"O'Bannon!"
"O'Bannon!" exclaimed John with a frown. "I've never talked to O'Bannon about you—about anything."
"You haven't abused me?" said Peter, wheeling on the schoolmaster, eyes and face and voice full of the suffering of his wounded self-love and of his wounded affection.
"I hope I've abused nobody!" said John proudly.
"Come in here!" cried Peter, springing up and hurrying into his shop.
Near the door stood a walnut tree with wide-spreading branches wearing the fresh plumes of late May, plumes that hung down over the door and across the windows, suffusing the interior with a soft twilight of green and brown shadows. A shaft of sunbeams penetrating a crevice fell on the white neck of a yellow collie that lay on the ground with his head on his paws, his eyes fixed reproachfully on the heels of the horse outside, his ears turned back toward his master. Beside him a box had been kicked over: tools and shoes scattered. A faint line of blue smoke sagged from the dying coals of the forge toward the door, creeping across the anvil bright as if tipped with silver. And in one of the darkest corners of the shop, near a bucket of water in which floated a huge brown gourd, Peter and John sat on a bench while the story of O'Bannon's mischief-making was begun and finished. It was told by Peter with much cordial rubbing of his elbows in the palms of his hands and much light-hearted smoothing of his apron over his knees. At times a cloud, passing beneath the sun, threw the shop into heavier shadow; and then the school-master's dark figure faded into the tone of the sooty wall behind him and only his face, with the contrast of its white linen collar below and the bare discernible lights of his auburn hair above—his face, proud, resolute, astounded, pallid, suffering—started out of the gloom like a portrait from an old canvas.
"And this is why you never came to see me." He had sprung up like a man made well, and was holding Peter's hand and looking reproachfully into his eyes.
"I'd have seen you dead first," cried Peter gaily, giving him a mighty slap on the shoulder. "But wait! O'Bannon's not the only man who can play a joke!"
John hurriedly left the shop with a gesture which Peter did not understand.
The web of deceptive circumstances that had been spun about him had been brushed away at last: he saw the whole truth now—saw his own blindness, blundering, folly, injustice.