CHAPTER 16. AGAIN THE BAR SINISTER

And yet, the next time Chad saw Margaret, she spoke to him shyly but
cordially, and when he did not come near her, she stopped him on the street
one day and reminded him of his promise to come and see them. And Chad knew
the truth at once--that she had never asked her father about him, but had not
wanted to know what she had been told she must not know, and had properly
taken it for granted that her father would not ask Chad to his house, if there
were a good reason why he should not come. But Chad did not go even to the
Christmas party that Margaret gave in town, though the Major urged him. He
spent Christmas with the Major, and he did go to a country party, where the
Major was delighted with the boy's grace and agility dancing the quadrille,
and where the lad occasioned no little amusement with his improvisations in
the way of cutting pigeon's wings and shuffling, which he had learned in the
mountains. So the Major made him accept a loan and buy a suit for social
purposes after Christmas, and had him go to Madam Blake's dancing school, and
promise to go to the next party to which he was asked. And that Chad did--to
the big gray house on the corner, through whose widespread doors his longing
eyes had watched Margaret and her friends flitting like butterflies months
before.

It intoxicated the boy--the lights, music, flowers, the little girls in
white--and Margaret. For the first time he met her friends, Nellie Hunt,
sister to Richard; Elizabeth Morgan, cousin to John Morgan; and Miss Jennie
Overstreet, who, young as she was, wrote poems--but Chad had eyes only for
Margaret. It was while he was dancing a quadrille with her, that he noticed a
tall, pale youth with black hair, glaring at him, and he recognized Georgie
Forbes, a champion of Margaret, and the old enemy who had caused his first
trouble in his new home. Chad laughed with fearless gladness, and Margaret