CHAPTER V
"HEY! JOHNNIE COPE"
After that visit to Craig-Ellachie Gavin was a new person to Christina. She was humiliated to remember that she had ever presumed to make fun of him. He was good and kind and chivalrous, and Sandy was right when he declared that Gavin knew far more than half the fellows around the village who thought themselves so much smarter. Christina thought about him often these soft slumbrous Autumn days and said to herself that, should he ever ask to walk home with her again, she would surely be much kinder than she had been. And she could not help wondering just a little why he did not try.
Indeed, had Gavin only known, he was very near gaining his heart's desire, when an unfortunate event snatched away his chance and tore him down from the heights to which he had unconsciously risen.
All the previous Winter and Summer the Temperance Society, which was the Presbyterian Choir, which was the Methodist Choir, had been practising strenuously for a concert. This weekly choir practice was really a community singing. Young and old, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists went to it, and Tremendous K. led them. There was an inner circle that sang on Sundays, in the Presbyterian Church in the morning and the Methodist Church in the evening. And they sang in the Baptist Church, too, on each alternate Sunday afternoon. For the Baptist minister lived in Avondell, and gave Orchard Glen only two services a month.
So this Union Choir decided to give a grand concert under the auspices of the Temperance Society to raise money to buy new chairs for the hall, and perhaps a new table if there was money enough. As the date of the concert approached the practices were twice a week, and every Tuesday and Thursday, from eight o'clock till half-past nine, Tremendous K.'s big voice might be heard booming:
"Watch your time, there! Sing up, can't you? Give her a lift! Don't pull as if you was haulin' a stun boat up the hill!"
It was just such drilling that had made the Orchard Glen choir famous over the whole countryside, and caused them to be in demand for tea meetings all through the Winter.
But the drilling was becoming wearisome, for the choir had been practising for a very long time indeed. The date of the concert had been set again and again, and on every occasion some other affair interfered.