“How can I?” he said.

“Go up inside—­there’s a trap door.  You can slide down the snow and get it.”

“But I might fall.”

“There’s your chance,” said Tom grinning.  John stood, still irresolute.  Leila walked away into the stable.

“She’ll get a man,” said Tom a little regretful of his rudeness, as she disappeared.

In a moment Leila was up in the hayloft and out on the roof.  Spreading out arms and thin legs she carefully let herself slide down the soft snow until, seizing her cap, she set her feet on the roof gutter, crying out, “Get a ladder quick.”  Alarmed at her perilous position, they ran and called out a groom, a ladder was brought, and in a moment she was on the ground.

Leila turned on the two lads.  “You are a coward, Tom McGregor, and you too, John Penhallow.  I never—­never will play with you again.”

“It was just fun,” said Tom; “any of the men could have poked it down.”

“Cowards,” said the girl, tossing back her dark mass of hair and moving away without a look at the discomfited pair.

“I suppose now you will go and tell the Squire,” said Tom.  He was alarmed.

She turned, “I—­a tell-tale!” Her child-code of conduct was imperative.  “I am neither a tell-tale nor a coward.  ’Tell-tale pick a nail and hang him to a cow’s tail!’” and with this well-known declaration of her creed of playground honour, she walked away.

“She’ll tell,” said Tom.

“She won’t,” said John.

“Guess I’ll go home,” said Tom, and left John to his reflections.  They were most disagreeable.

John went into the woods and sat down on a log.  “So,” he said aloud, “she called me a coward—­and I am—­I was—­I can’t bear it.  What would my uncle say?” His eyes filled.  He brushed away the tears with his sleeve.  A sudden remembrance of how good she had been to him, how loyally silent, added to his distress.  He longed for a chance to prove that he was not that—­that—­Eager and yet distrustful, he got up and walked through the melting snow to the cabin, where he lay on the floor thinking, a prey to that fiend imagination, of which he had a larger share than is always pleasant when excuses are needed.

Leila was coldly civil and held her tongue, but for a few days would not go into the woods with him and rode alone or with her uncle.  Tom came no more for a week, until self-assured that the Squire had not heard of his behaviour, as he met him on the road with his usual hearty greeting.  Ann Penhallow saw that the boy was less happy than usual and suspected some mild difficulty with Leila, but in her wise way said nothing and began to use him for some of her many errands of helpfulness in the village and on the farms, where always he made friends.  Seeing at last that the boy was too silent and to her eye unhappy, she talked of it to Mark Rivers.  The next day, after school, he said to John, “I want to see that old cabin in the woods.  Long as I have lived here I have never been that far.  Come and show me the way.  I tried once to find it and got lost.  We can have a jolly good talk, you and I.”