“Very good, sir!” And Harry could see his fingers tracing in his class-book the figures that meant a perfect recitation.

“How are you, Chad?” he said in the hallway afterward.

“Howdye!” said Chad, shaking the proffered hand.

“I didn’t know you—­you’ve grown so tall.  Didn’t you know me?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you speak to me?”

“’Cause you didn’t know me.”

Harry laughed.  “Well, that isn’t fair.  See you again.”

“All right,” said Chad.

That very afternoon Chad met Dan in a football game—­an old-fashioned game, in which there were twenty or thirty howling lads on each side and nobody touched the ball except with his foot—­met him so violently that, clasped in each other’s arms, they tumbled to the ground.

“Leggo!” said Dan.

“S’pose you leggo!” said Chad.

As Dan started after the ball he turned to look at Chad and after the game he went up to him.

“Why, aren’t you the boy who was out at Major Buford’s once?”

“Yes.”  Dan thrust out his hand and began to laugh.  So did Chad, and each knew that the other was thinking of the tournament.

“In college?”

“Math’matics,” said Chad.  “I’m in the kitchen fer the rest.”

“Oh!” said Dan.  “Where you living?” Chad pointed to the dormitory, and again Dan said “Oh!” in a way that made Chad flush, but added, quickly: 

“You better play on our side to-morrow.”

Chad looked at his clothes—­foot-ball seemed pretty hard on clothes—­“I don’t know,” he said—­“mebbe.”

It was plain that neither of the boys was holding anything against Chad, but neither had asked the mountain lad to come to see him—­an omission that was almost unforgivable according to Chad’s social ethics.  So Chad proudly went into his shell again, and while the three boys met often, no intimacy developed.  Often he saw them with Margaret, on the street, in a carriage or walking with a laughing crowd of boys and girls; on the porticos of old houses or in the yards; and, one night, Chad saw, through the wide-open door of a certain old house on the corner of Mill and Market Streets, a party going on; and Margaret, all in white, dancing, and he stood in the shade of the trees opposite with new pangs shooting through him and went back to his room in desolate loneliness, but with a new grip on his resolution that his own day should yet come.

Steadily the boy worked, forging his way slowly but surely toward the head of his class in the “kitchen,” and the school-master helped him unwearyingly.  And it was a great help—­mental and spiritual—­to be near the stern Puritan, who loved the boy as a brother and was ever ready to guide him with counsel and aid him with his studies.  In time the Major went to the president to ask him about Chad, and that august dignitary spoke of the lad in a way that made