During the service Hope sat stately in the pew, with her eyes fixed upon Dr. Peewee.  She knew the boys were there.  From time to time she observed that new boys had arrived, and that older ones had left.  But how she discovered it, who could say?  There was never one of Mr. Gray’s boys who could honestly declare that he had seen Hope Wayne looking at either of the pews in which they sat.  Perhaps she did not hear what Dr. Peewee said, although she looked at him so steadily.  Perhaps her heart did not look out of her eyes, but was busy with a hundred sweet fancies in which some one of those fascinated boys had a larger share than he knew.  Perhaps, when she covered her eyes in an attitude of devotion, she did not thereby exclude all thoughts of the outer and lower world.  Perhaps the Being for whose worship they were assembled was no more displeased with the innocent reveries and fancies which floated through that young heart than with the soft air and sweet song of birds that played through the open windows of the church on some warm June Sunday morning.

But when the shrill-voiced leader of the choir sounded the key-note of the hymn-tune through his nose, and the growling bass-viol joined in unison, while the congregation rose, and Dr. Peewee surveyed his people to mark who had staid away from service, then Hope Wayne looked at the choir as if her whole soul were singing; and young Gabriel Bennet, younger than Hope, had a choking feeling as he gazed at her—­an involuntary sense of unworthiness and shame before such purity and grace.  He counted every line of the hymn grudgingly, and loved the tunes that went back and repeated and prolonged—­the tunes endlessly da capo—­and the hymns that he heard as he looked at her he never forgot.

But there were other eyes than Gabriel Bennet’s that watched Hope Wayne, and for many months had watched her—­the flashing black eyes of Abel Newt.  Handsome, strong, graceful, he was one of the oldest boys, and a leader at Mr. Gray’s school.  Like every handsome, bold boy or young man, for he was fully eighteen, and seemed much older, Abel Newt had plenty of allies at school—­they could hardly be called friends.  There was many a boy who thought with the one nicknamed Little Malacca, although, more prudently than he, he might not say it:  “Abe gives me gingerbread; but I guess I don’t like him!” If a boy interfered with Abe he was always punished.  The laugh was turned on him; there was ceaseless ridicule and taunting.  Then if it grew insupportable, and came to fighting, Abel Newt was strong in muscle and furious in wrath, and the recusant was generally pommeled.