"I haven't asked her for any promise. It wouldn't be fair. She must have a chance to meet other young men, but, sometime, I hope she will be my wife."
"Poor children!" said Mrs. Vaughn, "you don't either of you know what you're doing."
He rose to go.
"I was a little premature," he added, "but you mustn't blame me. Put yourself in my place. If you were a young man and loved a girl as sweet as Polly and were walking home with her on a moonlit night—"
"I presume there'd be more or less love-making," said the widow. "She is a pretty thing and has the way of a woman. We were speaking of you the other day, and she said to me: 'He is ungrateful. You can teach the primer class for him, and be so good that you feel perfectly miserable, and give him lessons in dancing, and put on your best clothes, and make biscuit for him, and then, perhaps, he'll go out and talk with the hired man.' 'Polly,' said I, 'you're getting to be very foolish.' 'Well, it comes so easy,' said she. 'It's my one talent'"
XX
At the Theatre of the Woods
Next day Trove went home. He took with him many a souvenir of his first term, including a scarf that Polly had knit for him, and the curious things he took from the Frenchman Leblanc, and which he retained partly because they were curious and partly because Mrs. Leblanc had been anxious to get rid of them. He soon rejoined his class at Hillsborough, having kept abreast of it in history and mathematics by work after school and over the week's end. He was content to fall behind in the classics, for they were easy, and in them his arrears gave him no terror. Walking for exercise, he laid the plan of his tale and had written some bits of verse. Of an evening he went often to the Sign of the Dial, and there read his lines and got friendly but severe criticism. He came into the shop one evening, his "Horace" under his arm.
"'Maecenas, atavis, edite regibus'" Trove chanted, pausing to recall the lines.
The tinker turned quickly. "'O et presidium et duice decus meum,'" he quoted, never stopping until he had finished She ode.