“I’m a miserable sinner ’n’ the Lord’ll never forgive me,” she half moaned, when Chip tried to console her. “An’ to think ye feel the way ye say, ’n’ to bring me a present, arter all the mean things I said. It’s a-heapin’ coals o’ fire on my head, that it is.” And the shower increased.
“I have forgotten all about them, Hannah, truly I have,” Chip assured her, “and I wish you would. You didn’t understand me then, perhaps, or I you, so let us be friends now.”
The next afternoon Chip, who had learned that Miss Phinney’s school was to close the day following, set out to call on her in time to arrive at its adjournment.
No hint of her return had reached Miss Phinney, no letters had been exchanged, and not since that tearful separation had they met.
And now as Chip followed the lonely by-road so often traversed by her, what a flood of bitter-sweet memories returned,–each bend, each tree, each rock, and the bridge over the Mizzy held a different recollection. Here at this turn she had first met Ray, after her resolve to leave Greenvale. At the next landmark, a lane crossing the meadows, she had always parted from her teacher, the last time in tears. And how long, long ago it all seemed!
Then beyond, and barely visible, was the dear old schoolhouse. She could see it now, half hid in the bushes, a lone and lowly little brown building outlined on the winter landscape and apparently dwarfed in size. Once it had awed her; now it seemed pathetic.
The last of its pupils were vanishing as Chip drew near, and inside, and as lonely as that lone temple, Miss Phinney still lingered.
That day had not gone well with her. A note of complaint had come from one parent that morning, and news that a dearly loved scholar was ill as well, and Miss Phinney’s own life seemed like the fields just now–cold, desolate, and snow-covered.
And then while she, thus lone and lonesome, was putting away books, slates, ink-bottles, and all the badges of her servitude, Chip, without knocking, walked in.
How they first exclaimed, then embraced, then kissed, and then repeated it while each tried to wink the tears away, and failed; how they sat hand in hand in that dingy, smoke-browned room with its knife-hacked benches, unconscious of the chill, while Chip told her story; and how, just as the last rays of the setting sun flashed from the icicles along its eaves, they left it, still hand in hand, was but an episode such as many a schoolgirl can recall.