"What is it, Cherry?" Mr. Tracy asked; and, with a half sob, she replied:
"I can't go without Harold. If I get learning, he must get learning, too," and leaving Arthur, she crossed over to the boy, and putting her arm around him, looked up at him with a look which in after years he would have given half his life to win.
"I shall not forget Harold," Arthur hastened to say, "and I have something better in store for him than reciting his lessons to me. When the High School opens in September, he is going there, and if he does well he shall go to Andover in time, and perhaps to Harvard. It will all depend upon himself, and how he improves his opportunities. What! crying? Don't you like it?" Arthur asked, as he saw the tears gathering in Harold's eyes and rolling down his cheeks.
"Yes, oh, yes; but it don't seem real, and—and—I guess it makes me kind of sick," Harold gasped, as, freeing himself from Jerry's encircling arm, he hurried from the room, to think over this great and unexpected joy which had come so suddenly to him.
With his naturally refined tastes and instincts the dirty furnace work was not pleasant to him, neither were the many menial duties he was obliged to perform for the sake of those he loved. How to get an education was the problem he was earnestly trying to solve, and lo! it was solved for him. For a moment the suddenness of the thing overcame
him, and he sat down upon a block of wood in the
yard, faint and bewildered, while Arthur made his plan clear to Mrs. Crawford, saying that what he meant to do was partly for Jerry's sake and partly for the sake of the young girl who had been his early love.
"I always intended to take care of you," he said; "but things go from my mind, and I forget the past as completely as if it had never been. But this will stay by me, for I shall have Cherry as a reminder, and if I am in danger of forgetting she will jog my memory."
For a moment Mrs. Crawford could not speak, so great was her surprise and joy that the good she had thought unattainable was to be Harold's at last. And yet something in her proud, sensitive nature rebelled against receiving so much from a stranger, even if that stranger were Arthur Tracy. It seemed like charity, she said. But Arthur overruled her with that persuasive way he had of converting people to his views; and when at last he left the cottage it was with the understanding that Jerry should commence her lessons with him the first week in September, and that Harold should enter the High School in Shannondale when it opened in the autumn.
CHAPTER XX.
THE WORKING OF ARTHUR'S PLAN.