tossed her head. It was Georgie now who blackened and spread the blot on
Chad's good name, and it was Georgie to whom Chad--fast learning the ways of
gentlemen--promptly sent a pompous challenge, that the difficulty might be
settled "in any way the gentleman saw fit." Georgie insultingly declined to
fight with one who was not his equal, and Chad boxed his jaws in the presence
of a crowd, floored him with one blow, and contemptuously twisted his nose.
Thereafter open comment ceased. Chad was making himself known. He was the
swiftest runner on the football field; he had the quickest brain in
mathematics; he was elected to the Periclean Society, and astonished his
fellow-members with a fiery denunciation of the men who banished Napoleon to
St. Helena--so fiery was it, indeed, that his opponents themselves began to
wonder how that crime had ever come to pass. He would fight at the drop of a
hat, and he always won; and by-and-by the boy began to take a fierce joy in
battling his way upward against a block that would have crushed a weaker soul.
It was only with Margaret that that soul was in awe. He began to love her with
a pure reverence that he could never know at another age. Every Saturday
night, when dusk fell, he was mounting the steps of her house. Every Sunday
morning he was waiting to take her home from church. Every afternoon he looked
for her, hoping to catch sight of her on the streets, and it was only when Dan
and Harry got indignant, and after Margaret had made a passionate defence of
Chad in the presence of the family, that the General and Mrs. Dean took the
matter in hand. It was a childish thing, of course; a girlish whim. It was
right that they should be kind to the boy--for Major Buford's sake, if not for
his own; but they could not have even the pretence of more than a friendly
intimacy between the two, and so Margaret was told the truth. Immediately,
when Chad next saw her, her honest eyes sadly told him that she knew the
truth, and Chad gave up then. Thereafter he disappeared from sports and from
his kind every way, except in the classroom and in the debating hall. Sullenly
he stuck to his books. From five o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at
night, he was at them steadily, in his room, or at recitation except for an