She glowed with pleasure.
They had often walked along this road as far as his house, when accident brought them home from school at the same time. But their talk had never had this indefinable quality, as vague and beautiful as the misty color over the orchards.
Sometimes she had stopped at his house for a few minutes. His mother was a little woman with brisk, bustling manner. She always stood at the door to see that they wiped their feet before they went in. The house was very neat. There was an ingrain carpet on the front-room floor, swept till every thread showed. The center-table had a crocheted tidy on it and a Bible and a polished sea-shell. This room rose like a picture in her mind as they neared the gate. She did not want to leave Paul, but she did not want to go into that room with him now.
"Look here—wait a minute—" he said, stopping in the gateway. "I wanted to tell you—" He turned red and looked down at one toe, boring into the soft ground. "About this being valedictorian—"
"Oh!" she said. There had been a fierce rivalry between them for the honor of being valedictorian at the graduating exercises. There was nothing to choose between them in scholarship, but Paul had won. She knew the teachers had decided she did not dress well enough to take such a prominent part.
"I hope you don't feel bad about it, Helen," he went on awkwardly. "I told them I'd give it up, because you're a girl, and anyway you ought to have it, I guess. I don't feel right about taking it, some way."
"That's all right," she answered. "I don't care."
"Well, it's awfully good of you." She could see that he was very much relieved. She was glad she had lied about it. "Come in and look at what I've got in the shed," he said, getting away from the subject as quickly as possible.
She followed him around the house, under the old palm-tree that stood there. He had cleared out the woodshed and put in a table and a chair. On the table stood a telegraphic-sounder and key and a round, red, dry battery.
"I'm going to learn to be an operator," he said. "I've got most of the alphabet already. Listen." He made the instrument click. "I'm going to practise receiving, listening to the wires in the depot. Morrison says I can after I get through work. Telegraph-operators make as much as seventy dollars a month, and some of them, on the fast wires, make a hundred. I guess the train-dispatcher makes more than that."