"Please help yourself, Mr. Falkner," said the girl, with a little choke in her voice. "There it is." And she pointed to a wooden pail and tin dipper near the door.
"I am spending my vacation in the Ozarks; or rather, I came here to rest." He paused awkwardly. "I—I did not dream of your being here, or of course I should not have come, after your letter. Forgive me and I will go away again."
He turned to leave the room, but with his foot on the threshold, paused, and then walked back to the desk where the girl sat, leaning forward with her face buried in her arms.
"There's just one thing though, that I must say before I go. Are you in need of any help? If so, let me be of use to you; I am still your friend."
The brown head was raised and two glistening eyes proudly pleading looked at Dick.
Through a mist in his own eyes he saw two hands outstretched and heard a voice say, "I do need your help. Don't go. That is—I mean—leave me here now and to-morrow call, and I will tell you all. Only trust me this once."
Dick took the outstretched hands in his and stood for a moment with bowed head; then whispered softly, "Of course I will stay. Shall I come at this hour to-morrow?" Amy nodded, and he passed out of the building.
Had Dick looked back as he strode swiftly toward the timber, he would have seen a girlish form in the door holding out her hands; and had he listened as he climbed the fence, he might have heard a sweet voice falter, "Oh Dick, I love you. I love you." And just as he vanished at the edge of the woods, the girl who was more than all the world to him, fell for the second time in her life, fainting on the floor.
All the forenoon of the next day, Dick wandered aimlessly about the farm, but somehow he never got beyond sight of the little white school-house. He spent an hour watching the colts that frolicked in the upper pasture, beyond which lay the children's playground; then going through the field, he climbed the little hill beyond and saw the white building through the screen of leaves and branches. Once Amy came to the door, but only for a moment, when she called the shouting youngsters from their short recess. Then recrossing the valley half a mile above, he walked slowly home to dinner along the road leading past the building. How he envied the boys and girls whose droning voices reached his ears through the open windows.
While Dick was chatting with his kind host after dinner, as they sat on the porch facing the great oak, the latter talked about the spring and the history of the place; how it used to be a favorite camping ground for the Indians in winter; and pointed out the field below the barn, where they had found arrowheads by the hundreds. Then he told of the other spring just over the ridge, and how the two streams came together and flowed on, larger and larger, to the river. And then with a farmer's fondness for a harmless jest, he suggested that Dick might find it worth his while to visit the other spring; "for," said he "the school-marm lives there; and she's a right pretty girl. Sensible too, I reckon, though she aint been here only since the first of September."