en," he had
said. "The little hotel where you will have to put up is rather rough
and uncomfortable, but you are always welcome at my home, and this I
mean, and I hope you will understand it that way without my mentioning
it again."

The boy's heart leaped to his throat as he listened, and a dozen
additional times that day his eyes had rested on the clump of trees
which shaded the roof sheltering Ruth.

That the exclusive Miss Grayson should now have invited him to pass some
days at her home had brought with it a thrill of greater delight. Her
opinion of the boy had changed somewhat. His willingness to put up with
the discomforts of the village inn--"a truly dreadful place," to quote
one of Miss Felicia's own letters--and to continue to put up with them
for more than two years, while losing nothing of his good-humor and good
manners, had shaken her belief in the troubadour and tin-armor theory,
although nothing in Jack's surroundings or in his prospects for the
future fitted him, so far as she could see, to life companionship with
so dear a girl as her beloved Ruth--a view which, of course, she kept
strictly to herself.

But she still continued to criticise him, at which Peter would rub his
hands and break out with:

"Fine fellow!--square peg in a square hole this time. Fine fellow, I
tell you, Felicia!"

He receiving in reply some such answer as:

"Yes, quite lovely in fairy tales, Peter, and when you have taught
him--for you did it, remember--how to shovel and clean up underbrush
and split rocks--and that just's what Ruth told me he was doing when she
took a telegram to her father which had come to the house--and he in
a pair of overalls, like any common workman--what, may I ask, will you
have him doing next? Is he to be an engineer or a clerk all his life?
He might have had a share in his uncle's business by this time if he had
had any common-sense;" Peter retorting often with but a broad smile
and that little gulp of satisfaction--something between a chuckle and a
sigh--which always escaped him when some one of his proteges were living
up to his pet theories.

And yet it was Miss Felicia herself who was the first to welcome the
reprobate, even going to the front door and standing in the icy draught,
with the snowflakes whirling about her pompadoured head, until Jack had
alighted from the tail-end of Moggins's 'bus and, with his satchel in
his hand, had cleared the sidewalk with a bound and stood beside her.