It was a little fish, dressed and ready to fry, that was in the tiny bundle. The boy extended it blushingly. Then his eyes lifted to Loraine's in frank petition for pardon.
"I was mighty rude," he said. "I went back to the pond to say so, but you were gone. I beg your pardon."
She liked the tone of his voice and his good red blushes. "That's all right," she nodded reassuringly. But he did not go away. There was something else.
"If—you know what you said? If you'd offer again—"
Loraine glanced over her shoulder. Laura Ann was rattling stove-lids at the other end of the kitchen. "I offer now," Loraine said in a low voice.
"Then I accept." The boy's voice was eager. "I'll study like everything! I thought about it in the night—I thought I'd like to surprise my mother. If I could get into college next year—" His eyes shone. "Oh I say, I'd do 'most anything for that!"
The little plan was hurriedly made, in low tones, there on Emmeline Camp's little doorsteps. The boy was to take his books to the pond where Loraine had caught her fish. He was to study there alone for a time every day, and in the afternoon she was to stroll that way and go over the work with him and set him right in all the wrong places.
"It was in Latin and mathematics I failed up," Jane Cotton's Sam explained.
"It's Latin and mathematics we'll tackle!" softly laughed Loraine. "You wait—you see—you grind!"
He strode away, whistling, and the tune was full of courage and determination. Loraine smiled as she listened. She stood a moment, then opened the screen door and went in. The "Compact" swung and tilted with the jolt of her energetic movements. She adjusted it with a queer little smile.