"Yes, I wish to see her more than any one else. Tell
her that I am coming to see her before I go away, and give her my
love. Thank you, my dear," as Marilla offered his missing hat.
"Good-by, boys and girls." He stopped and looked at them once more
from the boys' entry, and turned again to look back from the very
doorstep.
"Good-by, sir,--good-by," piped two or three of the young voices; but
most of the children only stared, and neither spoke nor moved.
"We will omit the class in Fourth Reader this afternoon. The class in
grammar may recite," said Miss Hender in her most contained and
official manner.
The grammar class sighed like a single pupil, and obeyed. She was very
stern with the grammar class, but every one in school had an inner
sense that it was a great day in the history of District Number Four.
II.
The Honorable Mr. Laneway found the outdoor air very fresh and sweet
after the closeness of the school-house. It had just that same odor in
his boyhood, and as he escaped he had a delightful sense of playing
truant or of having an unexpected holiday. It was easier to think of
himself as a boy, and to slip back into boyish thoughts, than to bear
the familiar burden of his manhood. He climbed the tumble-down stone
wall across the road, and went along a narrow path to the spring that
bubbled up clear and cold under a great red oak. How many times he had
longed for a drink of that water, and now here it was, and the thirst
of that warm spring day was hard to quench! Again and again he stopped
to fill the birchbark dipper which the school-children had made, just
as his own comrades made theirs years before.
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