Turner called Melissa from him in the orchard next day, Chad lay on his back under an apple-tree, for a long while, thinking; and then he whistled for Jack and climbed the spur above the river where he could look down on the shadowed water and out to the clouded heaps of rose and green and crimson, where the sun was going down under one faint white star.  Melissa was the glow-worm that, when darkness came, would be a watch-fire at his feet—­Margaret, the star to which his eyes were lifted night and day—­and so runs the world.  He lay long watching that star.  It hung almost over the world of which he had dreamed so long and upon which he had turned his back forever.  Forever?  Perhaps, but he went back home that night with a trouble in his soul that was not to pass, and while he sat by the fire he awoke from the same dream to find Melissa’s big eyes fixed on him, and in them was a vague trouble that was more than his own reflected back to him.

Still the boy went back sturdily to his old life, working in the fields, busy about the house and stable, going to school, reading and studying with the school-master at nights, and wandering in the woods with Jack and his rifle.  And he hungered for spring to come again when he should go with the Turner boys to take another raft of logs down the river to the capital.  Spring came, and going out to the back pasture one morning, Chad found a long-legged, ungainly creature stumbling awkwardly about his old mare—­a colt!  That, too, he owed the Major, and he would have burst with pride had he known that the colt’s sire was a famous stallion in the Bluegrass.  That spring he did go down the river again.  He did not let the Major know he was coming and, through a nameless shyness, he could not bring himself to go to see his old friend and kinsman, but in Lexington, while he and the school-master were standing on Cheapside, the Major whirled around a corner on them in his carriage, and, as on the turnpike a year before, old Tom, the driver, called out: 

“Look dar, Mars Cal!” And there stood Chad.

“Why, bless my soul!  Chad—­why, boy!  How you have grown!” For Chad had grown, and his face was curiously aged and thoughtful.  The Major insisted on taking him home, and the school-master, too, who went reluctantly.  Miss Lucy was there, looking whiter and more fragile than ever, and she greeted Chad with a sweet kindliness that took the sting from his unjust remembrance of her.  And what that failure to understand her must have been Chad better knew when he saw the embarrassed awe, in her presence, of the school-master, for whom all in the mountains had so much reverence.  At the table was Thankyma’am waiting.  Around the quarters and the stable the pickaninnies and servants seemed to remember the boy in a kindly genuine way that touched him, and even Jerome Conners, the overseer, seemed glad to see him.  The Major was drawn at once to the grave school-master, and he had a long talk with him that night.  It was no use, Caleb