Of this shackled spirit of kindness, always striving within the old man, the little boy had come to be entirely conscious.  So real was it to him, so dependable, that he never suspected that a certain little blow with the open hand one day was meant to punish him for conduct he had persisted in after three emphatic admonitions.

“Oh! that hurts!” he had cried, looking up at the confused old man with unimpaired faith in his having meant not more than a piece of friendly roughness.  This look of flawless confidence in the uprightness of his purpose, the fine determination to save him chagrin by smiling even though the hurt place tingled, left in the old man’s mind a biting conviction that he had been actually on the point of behaving as one gentleman may not behave to another.  Quick was he to make the encounter accord with the child’s happy view, even picking him up and forcing from himself the gaiety to rally him upon his babyish tenderness to rough play.  Not less did he hold it true that “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame—­” and with the older boy he was not unconscientious in this matter.  For Allan took punishment as any boy would, and, indeed, was so careful that he seldom deserved it.  But the old man never ceased to be grateful that the littler boy had laughed under that one blow, unable to suspect that it could have been meant in earnest.

From the first day that the little boy felt the tender cool grass under his bare toes that summer, life became like perfectly played music.  This was after the long vacation began, when there was no longer any need to remember to let his voice fall after a period, or to dread his lessons so that he must learn them more quickly than any other pupil in school.  There would be no more of that wretched fooling until fall, a point of time inconceivably far away.  Before it arrived any one of a number of strange things might happen to avert the calamity of education.  For instance, he might be born again, a thing of which he had lately heard talk; a contingency by no means flawless in prospect, since it probably meant having the mumps again, and things like that.  But if it came on the very last day of vacation, or on the first morning of school, just as he was called on to recite, snatching him from the very jaws of the Moloch, and if it fixed him so he need not be afraid in the night of going where Milo Barrus was going, then it might not be so bad.

Nancy, who had now discarded the good name of Lillian May for simple Alice, disapproved heartily of being born again; unless, indeed, one could be born a boy the second time.  She was only too eager for the day when she need not submit to having her hair brushed and combed so long every morning of her life.  Not for the world would she go through it again and have to begin French all over, even at “J’ai, tu as, il a.”  Yet, if it were certain she could be a boy—­