the school-teacher." And the little
girl shook her head over her frightful crime of disobedience.

"You HAIN'T?"

"I HAIN'T!"

Melissa, too, was a waif, and Chad looked at her with a wave of new
affection and pity.

"Now, why won't you go back just because you hain't got no daddy an'
mammy?"

Chad hesitated. There was no use making Melissa unhappy.

"Oh, I'd just ruther stay hyeh in the mountains," he said,
carelessly--lying suddenly like the little gentleman that he was--lying
as he knew, and as Melissa some day would come to know. Then Chad
looked at the little girl a long while, and in such a queer way that
Melissa turned her face shyly to the red star.

"I'm goin' to stay right hyeh. Ain't you glad, Lissy?"

The little girl turned her eyes shyly back again. "Yes, Chad," she said.

He would stay in the mountains and work hard; and when he grew up he
would marry Melissa and they would go away where nobody knew him or
her: or they would stay right there in the mountains where nobody
blamed him for what he was nor Melissa for what she was; and he would
study law like Caleb Hazel, and go to the Legislature--but Melissa! And
with the thought of Melissa in the mountains came always the thought of
dainty Margaret in the Bluegrass and the chasm that lay between the
two--between Margaret and him, for that matter; and when Mother Turner
called Melissa from him in the orchard next day, Chad lay on his back
under an apple-tree, for a long while, thinking; and then he whistled
for Jack and climbed the spur above the river where he could look down
on the shadowed water and out to the clouded heaps of rose and green
and crimson, where the sun was going down under one faint white star.
Melissa was the glow-worm that, when darkness came, would be a
watch-fire at his feet--Margaret, the star to which his eyes were
lifted night and day--and so runs the world. He lay long watching that
star. It hung almost over the world of which he had dreamed so long and
upon which he had turned his back forever. Forever? Perhaps, but he
went back home that night with a trouble in his soul that was not to
pass, and while he sat by the fire he awoke from the same dream to find
Melissa's big eyes fixed on him, and in them was a vague trouble that
was more than his own reflected back to him.

Still the boy went back sturdily to his old life, working in the
fields, busy about the house and stable, going to school, reading and
studying with th