The crowds of girls near by were boring him into the very ground with their eyes.  His feet and his hands had grown to enormous proportions and seemed suddenly to belong to somebody else.  He felt like an ant in a grain-hopper, or as though he were deep under water in a long dive and must in a moment actually gasp for breath.  And, remembering St. Hilda, he did manage to get his hat off, but he was speechless.  Marjorie paused, the smile did not leave her eyes, but it turned serious, and she lowered her voice a little.

“Did you keep your promise, Jason?”

Then the boy found himself, and as he had said before, that winter dusk, he said now soberly: 

“I give you my hand.”

And, as before, taking him literally, Marjorie again stretched out her hand.

“I’m so glad.”

Once more the bugle sent its mellow summons through the air.

“And you are coming to our house some Saturday night to go coon-hunting—­good-by.”

Jason turned weakly away, and all the rest of the day he felt dazed.  He did not want to see Mavis or Gray or Marjorie again, or even John Burnham.  So he started back home afoot, and all the way he kept to the fields through fear that some one of them might overtake him on the road, for he wanted to be alone.  And those fields looked more friendly now than they had looked at dawn, and his heart grew lighter with every step.  Now and then a rabbit leaped from the grass before him, or a squirrel whisked up the rattling bark of a hickory-tree.  A sparrow trilled from the swaying top of a purple ironwood, and from grass, and fence-rail, and awing, meadow larks were fluting everywhere, but the song of no wood-thrush reached his waiting ear.  Over and over again his brain reviewed every incident of the day, only to end each time with Marjorie’s voice, her smile with its new quality of mischief, and the touch of her hand.  She had not forgotten—­that was the thrill of it all—­and she had even asked if he had kept his promise to her.  And at that thought his soul darkened, for the day would come when he must ask to be absolved of one part of that promise, as on that day he must be up and on his dead father’s business.  And he wondered what, when he told her, she would say.  It was curious, but the sense of the crime involved was naught, as was the possible effect of it on his college career—­it was only what that girl would say.  But the day might still be long off, and he had so schooled himself to throwing aside the old deep, sinister purpose that he threw it off now and gave himself up to the bubbling relief that had come to him.  That meeting in the lane must have been chance, John Burnham was kind, and Marjorie had not forgotten.  He was not alone in the world, nor was he even lonely, for everywhere that day he had found a hand stretched out to help him.

Mavis was sitting on the porch when he walked through the gate, and the moment she saw his face a glad light shone in her own, for it was the old Jason coming back to her: