To Buddy Lutts' keen appreciation, the only flaw in this wholesome narrative was the printed rumor that Sap McGill had escaped and was slowly recuperating over in Southpaw.
'Twas some days ere Belle-Ann fitted her mood to her strange environments. The Mission School at Proctor was a beautiful place--a great rambling structure on the apex of a hill overlooking the picturesque Kentucky River. The building was girded with a continuous, spacious porch, and hemmed about with flowers, the identity of which was unknown to her. The grounds behind were unstinting, and reached half a mile back to the mountain abutting it.
Flanking the building proper, on the verdant esplanade, stood a superb statue of Daniel Boone, embellished with a gurgling fountain which the State had recently reared on this spot where Boone had built his historic fortress.
Belle-Ann was allotted a cozy little room with white enamel furniture, and pretty curtains, and quaint Japanese matting, the like of which had never met her admiring eyes.
Withal, Belle-Ann was deeply pleased with her new surroundings--with the other scholars and with the teachers. But so much had been crowded into her young life of late, coupled with the pang of parting from her home, that it was days before her mood aroused itself to the necessity of application.
When she did begin her lessons, it was with an assiduous energy and receptive aptitude that not only attracted the teachers, but the other pupils likewise. From the outset, she developed an inordinate thirst for grammar. Indeed, a great part of the time out of study hours, she carried her grammar about with her, peeping into it anon, spelling, repeating, and pondering over its phrases--never tiring of its dawning mysteries and vast possibilities.
The Mission School, familiarly designated as the Chapel, was not an academic institution of classics and national renown, but it was of State-wide repute and an oasis of preparatory learning amidst the barren lives of mountain youth, hitherto isolated and deprived of the advantages of his more fortunate Blue-Grass cousins.
Miss Virginia Worth, in charge of the Chapel, was as agreeably impressed with Belle-Ann as the girl was pleased with the charming teacher. Miss Worth was a woman of thirty-seven, with an abundance of perfectly white hair and the fresh, smooth face of a girl of twenty. Upon this benign, wholesome countenance there dwelt an ever-present sympathy and love for mankind. In her gray eyes was a look of succor that beckoned suffering to her. Oddly enough, a woman of private wealth, she had made the uplift of the mountain folk her life work.