The Christmas holidays and other recesses were spent with his friend, Professor Harding, and his family, who had removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, where the professor had secured the position of superintendent of schools.
Once every year Clifford had paid a flying visit to Cedar Hill, and called upon his old friend, Maria Kimberly, who was still housekeeper for Squire Talford. He was in no wise disappointed upon these occasions because he did not meet the squire, who, if he happened to be in the house, never showed himself; but Maria invariably greeted him with a beaming face and eyes full of happy tears.
“What a gentleman you have grown, to be sure!” she remarked admiringly during one of those calls after their greetings were over.
“Thank you, Maria,” Clifford retorted, with a gleam of mischief in his handsome brown eyes, “but, really, I am in some doubt whether to accept that as a compliment or not, for I always tried to be a gentleman.”
“Oh, get out! You know I didn’t mean that, Clifford,” the woman returned, and flushed. “Of course, you were always a gentleman. With such a mother as you had you couldn’t have been anything else. I only meant that you’ve got a spruce look about you that you didn’t have when you lived here—how could you, when you wasn’t allowed a decent thing to wear!”
“I understand,” said Clifford, reassuringly; “but”—willing to do the squire justice—“my freedom suit was a pretty good one.”
“Yes—it was,” Maria laconically observed, with an audible chuckle, while her square shoulders shook with suppressed mirth.
The squire had never quite gotten over the mistake (?) about Clifford’s freedom suit, and never saw Tom, the milk-driver, wearing the shoddy clothes that had been made for himself without becoming secretly enraged and giving expression to muttered remarks that were more emphatic than elegant.
At the time of this last call of Clifford’s, which occurred during a short recess of his senior year, the man had gone to New Haven on business, and Maria kept him talking so busily that she did not realize how rapidly the time was passing until a glance at the clock made her start and suddenly cut herself short.
“My!” she exclaimed, “here it is most five o’clock, and you must have some supper before you go.”