“I’ll pay you back,” said Chad.  “I’ll leave you my hoss when I go ’way, if I don’t,” and the Major laughingly said that was all right and he made Chad, too, think that it was all right.  And so spring took the shape of hope in Chad’s breast, that morning, and a little later it took the shape of Margaret, for he soon saw the Dean children ahead of him in the road and he ran to catch up with them.

All looked at him with surprise—­seeing his broad white collar with ruffles, his turned-back, ruffled cuffs, and his boots with red tops; but they were too polite to say anything.  Still Chad felt Margaret taking them all in and he was proud and confident.  And, when her eyes were lifted to the handsome face that rose from the collar and the thick yellow hair, he caught them with his own in an unconscious look of fealty, that made the little girl blush and hurry on and not look at him again until they were in school, when she turned her eyes, as did all the other boys and girls, to scan the new “scholar.”  Chad’s work in the mountains came in well now.  The teacher, a gray, sad-eyed, thin-faced man, was surprised at the boy’s capacity, for he could read as well as Dan, and in mental arithmetic even Harry was no match for him; and when in the spelling class he went from the bottom to the head in a single lesson, the teacher looked as though he were going to give the boy a word of praise openly and Margaret was regarding him with a new light in her proud eyes.  That was a happy day for Chad, but it passed after school when, as they went home together, Margaret looked at him no more; else Chad would have gone by the Deans’ house when Dan and Harry asked him to go and look at their ponies and the new sheep that their father had just bought; for Chad was puzzled and awed and shy of the little girl.  It was strange—­he had never felt that way about Melissa.  But his shyness kept him away from her day after day until, one morning, he saw her ahead of him going to school alone, and his heart thumped as he quietly and swiftly overtook her without calling to her; but he stopped running that she might not know that he had been running, and for the first time she was shy with him.  Harry and Dan were threatened with the measles, she said, and would say no more.  When they went through the fields toward the school-house, Chad stalked ahead as he had done in the mountains with Melissa, and, looking back, he saw that Margaret had stopped.  He waited for her to come up, and she looked at him for a moment as though displeased.  Puzzled, Chad gave back her look for a moment and turned without a word—­still stalking ahead.  He looked back presently and Margaret had stopped and was pouting.

“You aren’t polite, little boy.  My mamma says a nice little boy always lets a little girl go first.”  But Chad still walked ahead.  He looked back presently and she had stopped again—­whether angry or ready to cry, he could not make out—­ so he waited for her, and as she came slowly near he stepped gravely from the path, and Margaret went on like a queen.