o. Jim Harvey's getting it
up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a little
nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he lay
biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I
don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim
Harvey."

Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.

"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to
that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know
it isn't because I don't wish to."

"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true. You
can wish it on my amethyst ring."

"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"

"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on
and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was
practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home
as they came laughing up the hill.

As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once
that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice,
to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done
to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it
happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave
up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury.
And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet,
the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be
let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned
out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning
he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing,
thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the
Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found
occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could
afford;--bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before
the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that
Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. They had moved
Ellen's bed downstairs as a way of getting on better with the
possibility of her being bedridden all that winter, and the tiny
whispered moan recalled him to the dread that as the half yearly term
came around, what with doctor's bills and delicacies, the mortgage
dragon would have not even his sop o