“Go home,” cried Mrs. Zelotes; “go home just as fast as you can and go to bed.  Go home!” Mrs. Zelotes made a violent shooting motion with her hands and her white head as if he were a cat, and Granville Joy obeyed.  However, Ellen heard his brave, retreating whistle far down the road.  She went back to bed, and lay awake with a fervor of young love roused into a flame by opposition swelling high in her heart.  But the next afternoon, after school, Ellen, to Granville Joy’s great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the street with her.  And when they reached his house, which was only half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise as he motioned to leave her that he could not mistake it, and he walked on at her side quite to her own house.  Granville Joy was a gentle boy, young for his age, which was a year more than Ellen’s.  He had a face as gentle as a girl’s, and really beautiful.  Women all loved him, and the school-girls raised an admiring treble chorus in his praise whenever his name was spoken.  He was saved from effeminacy by nervous impulses which passed for sustained manly daring.  “He once licked a boy a third bigger than he was, and you needn’t call him sissy,” one girl said once to a decrying friend.  To-day, as the boy and girl neared Mrs. Zelotes’s house, Granville was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the terrible old lady.  He expected every minute to hear the grating upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a terrible intimidation of feminine will.  Granville had a mother as gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous.  He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen’s grandmother.  He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently, when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little.  But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two marched past under the fire of Mrs. Zelotes’s gaze.  Ellen had retaliated, not nobly, but as naturally under the conditions of her life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west wind.

[Illustration:  He found himself walking home from school with her]

Chapter XVI

Ellen, when she graduated, was openly pronounced the flower of her class.  Not a girl equalled her, not a boy surpassed her.  When Ellen came home one night about two months before her graduation, and announced that she was to have the valedictory, such a light of pure joy flashed over her mother’s face that she looked ten years younger.