It intoxicated the boy—­the lights, music, flowers, the little girls in white—­and Margaret.  For the first time he met her friends, Nellie Hunt, sister to Richard; Elizabeth Morgan, cousin to John Morgan; and Miss Jennie Overstreet, who, young as she was, wrote poems—­but Chad had eyes only for Margaret.  It was while he was dancing a quadrille with her, that he noticed a tall, pale youth with black hair, glaring at him, and he recognized Georgie Forbes, a champion of Margaret, and the old enemy who had caused his first trouble in his new home.  Chad laughed with fearless gladness, and Margaret tossed her head.  It was Georgie now who blackened and spread the blot on Chad’s good name, and it was Georgie to whom Chad—­fast learning the ways of gentlemen—­promptly sent a pompous challenge, that the difficulty might be settled “in any way the gentleman saw fit.”  Georgie insultingly declined to fight with one who was not his equal, and Chad boxed his jaws in the presence of a crowd, floored him with one blow, and contemptuously twisted his nose.  Thereafter open comment ceased.  Chad was making himself known.  He was the swiftest runner on the football field; he had the quickest brain in mathematics; he was elected to the Periclean Society, and astonished his fellow-members with a fiery denunciation of the men who banished Napoleon to St. Helena—­so fiery was it, indeed, that his opponents themselves began to wonder how that crime had ever come to pass.  He would fight at the drop of a hat, and he always won; and by-and-by the boy began to take a fierce joy in battling his way upward against a block that would have crushed a weaker soul.  It was only with Margaret that that soul was in awe.  He began to love her with a pure reverence that he could never know at another age.  Every Saturday night, when dusk fell, he was mounting the steps of her house.  Every Sunday morning he was waiting to take her home from church.  Every afternoon he looked for her, hoping to catch sight of her on the streets, and it was only when Dan and Harry got indignant, and after Margaret had made a passionate defence of Chad in the presence of the family, that the General and Mrs. Dean took the matter in hand.  It was a childish thing, of course; a girlish whim.  It was right that they should be kind to the boy—­for Major Buford’s sake, if not for his own; but they could not have even the pretence of more than a friendly intimacy between the two, and so Margaret was told the truth.  Immediately, when Chad next saw her, her honest eyes sadly told him that she knew the truth, and Chad gave up then.  Thereafter he disappeared from sports and from his kind every way, except in the classroom and in the debating hall.  Sullenly he stuck to his books.  From five o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, he was at them steadily, in his room, or at recitation except for an hour’s walk with the school-master and the three half-hours that his meals kept him away.  He grew so pale and thin that the Major and Caleb Hazel