irs a lady
appeared.

"What is it, son?" Judge March asked, and rising, saw the lady draw near
the girl with a look of pitying uncertainty. The tattered form stood
trembling, with tears starting down her cheeks.

"Miss Rose--Oh, Miss Rose, it's me!"

"Why, Johanna, my poor child!" Two kind arms opened and the mass of rags
and mud dashed into them. The girl showered her kisses upon the pure
garments, and the lady silently, tenderly, held her fast. Then she took
the black forehead between her hands.

"Child, what does this mean?"

"Oh, it means nothin' but C'nelius, Miss Rose--same old C'nelius! I
hadn't nowhere to run but to you, an' no chance to come but night."

"Can you go upstairs and wait a moment for me in my room? No, poor
child, I don't think you can!" But Johanna went, half laughing, half
crying, and beckoning to Barbara in the old-time wheedling way.

"Go, Barbara."

The child followed, while John and his father stood with captive hearts
before her whom the youths of the college loved to call in valedictory
addresses the Rose of Rosemont. She spent a few moments with them,
holding John's more than willing hand, and then called in the
principal's first assistant, Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew, a smallish man of
forty, in piratical white duck trousers, kid slippers, nankeen sack, and
ruffled shirt. Irritability confessed itself in this gentleman's face,
which was of a clay color, with white spots. Mr. Pettigrew presently
declared himself a Virginian, adding, with the dignity of a fallen king,
that he--or his father, at least--had lost over a hundred slaves by the
war. It was their all. But the boy could not shut his ear to the sweet
voice of Mrs. Garnet as, at one side, she talked to his father.

"Sir?" he responded to the first assistant, who was telling him he ought
to spell March with a final e, it being always so spelled--in Virginia.
The Judge turned for a lengthy good-by, and at its close John went with
his preceptor to the school-room, trying, quite in vain, to conceive how
Mr. Pettigrew had looked when he was a boy.

XVI.

A GROUP OF NEW INFLUENCES

All Rosemonters were required to sit together at Sunday morning service,
in a solid mass of cadet gray. After this there was ordinary freedom.
Thus, when good weather and roads and Mrs. March's strength permitted,
John had the joy of seeing his father and mother come into church; for
Rosemont was always ahead of time, and the Marches behind. T