"I am so sorry," said Lucy; "but my friend—the principal, you know—is out. She does not often leave the house and garden, even for an hour, excepting to go to church; but I persuaded her to go down to the village this afternoon. I am so very sorry!"
"So am I," responded Ralph, with mendacious politeness. "May I come in?"
"Oh, yes, please!" said Lucy. "But the horse?"
"He will stand till this day week," said Ralph. "But I'll hitch the reins over the palings all the same."
"This way," said Lucy, eagerly; and she led him to the school-room. He stared up at the very small hole in the roof with the deepest gravity apparently; but in reality he was thinking how sweetly pretty the face beside him looked as she upturned to gaze aloft.
"All right," he said, with a laugh. "I'll see that it is put straight. You are sure there is nothing else?"
"N-o," said Lucy, "nothing. Oh, yes! the gate to the meadow is so very old that that the donkey in the next field pushes it open, and—"
"Let us go in and see it," said Ralph, promptly. "We may as well do everything that wants doing at once."
They went to the meadow, and he examined the gate and admired the view across the fields, and on Lucy telling him it was much better from the edge of the wood, he wandered off in that direction, and, somehow or other, they found themselves sitting on the stile that led into the plantation and talking, as Lucy put it afterward, "like old friends"—so much so, indeed, that it was with quite a start that Lucy heard the clock strike five.