The brightest of sunshine gilded the spires and steeples of the village. It flooded highway and meadows with rich yellow light, but Andy, swinging his school books over his shoulder, walked on with drooping head and a cheerless heart.
"It's pretty bad, it's just the very worst!" he said with a deep sigh, as he reached a stile and sat down a-straddle of it.
Andy tossed his books up into the hollow of a familiar oak near at hand.
Then he fell to serious thinking.
His gaze roving over the landscape, lit on the farmhouse of Jabez Dale.
It revived the recent allusion of the old schoolmaster.
"I didn't steal that calf," declared Andy, straightening up indignantly. "Graham, who boards over at Millville, told us boys how Dale had sold a cow to a farmer there. He said they took her away from her calf, and the poor thing refused to eat. She just paced up and down a pasture fence from morning till night, crying for her calf. We got the calf, and carried it to its mother. I'll never forget the sight, and I'll never regret it, either—and what's best, the man who had got the cow was so worked up over its almost human grief, that he paid Dale for the calf, too, and kept it."
The memory of the incident brightened up Andy momentarily. Then, his glance flitting to the distant roof of a small neat cottage in a pretty grove of cedars, his face fell again. He choked on a great lump in his throat.
"Ginger!" he whistled dolefully, "how can I ever face the music over there!"
The cottage was Andy's home, but the thought had no charm or sweetness for the lone orphan boy whom its roof had grudgingly sheltered for the past five years.
Once it had belonged to his father. He had died when Andy was ten years old. Then it had passed into the legal possession of Mr. Wildwood's half-sister, Miss Lavinia Talcott.
This aunt was Andy's nearest relative. He had lived with her since his father's death, if it could be called living.