“It’s really quite funny. I said to myself, ‘the pence will mount up so that they will be quite a nuisance to Miss Thorne, and I’ll go and offer to get them off her hands.’”
“Thank you, Mr Chute, I won’t trouble you,” replied Hazel.
“Trouble? Oh, it’s no trouble,” he said, laughing in a peculiar way. “I get rid of mine at the shops, and I can just as easily put yours with them, and of course it’s much easier to keep shillings than pence; and then when you’ve got enough you can change your silver for gold.”
“By-the-way,” said Hazel, “when do we have to give up the school pence and club money?”
“Only once a year,” said Mr Chute, who was in high glee at this approach to intimacy. “You’ll have to keep it till Christmas.”
“Keep it—till Christmas! What! all that money!”
“To be sure! Oh, it isn’t much. May I—send your—coppers with mine?”
Hazel paused for a moment, and then accepted the offer, the schoolmaster noting in his pocket-book the exact amount, and waiting while Hazel went into the cottage to fetch the other sums she had received, the whole of which Mr Chute bore off in triumph, smiling ecstatically, and exclaiming to himself as soon as he was alone:
“She’s mine!—she’s mine!—she’s mine!”
After which he performed a kind of triumphal dance around the bags of copper, rubbing his hands with satisfaction at this step towards making himself useful to Hazel Thorne, until Mrs Chute came into the room, and asked him what he meant by making such a fool of himself.