With his naturally refined tastes and instincts the dirty furnace work had not been pleasant to him, and he had shrunk with inexpressible loathing from the swill cart and the other menial duties he had been obliged to perform for the sake of those he loved. How to get an education was the problem he was earnestly trying to solve, and lo! it was now solved for him. For a moment the suddenness of the thing overcame him, and he sat down upon a table in the yard, faint and bewildered, while Arthur made his plan clear to Mrs. Crawford, saying that what he meant to do was partly for Jerry's sake and partly for the sake of the young girl who had been his early love.
'I always intended to take care of you,' he said; 'but things go from my mind, and I forget the past as completely as if it had never been. But this will stay by me, for I shall have Cherry as a reminder, and if I am in danger of forgetting she will jog my memory.'
Fur a moment Mrs. Crawford could not speak, so great was her surprise and joy that the good she had thought unattainable was to be Harold's at last. And yet something in her proud, sensitive nature rebelled against receiving so much from a stranger, even if that stranger were Arthur Tracy. It seemed like charity, she said, when at last she spoke at all. But Arthur overruled her with that persuasive way he had of converting people to his views; and when at last he left the cottage it was with the understanding that Jerry should commence her lessons with him the first week in September, and that Harold should enter the High School in Shannondale when it opened in the autumn.
As Arthur was wholly uncommunicative with regard to his affairs, and as Mrs. Crawford kept her own counsel, and bade Harold and Jerry do the same, the Tracys knew nothing whatever of the plan until the September morning when Jerry presented herself at the park house, and was met in the door-way by Mrs. Frank, who was just going out. Very few could have resisted the bright little face, so full of childish happiness, or the clear, assured voice, which said so cheerily:
'Good-morning, Mrs. Tracy. I'm come to school.'
But, prejudiced as she was against the girl, Mrs. Tracy could resist any thing, and she answered, haughtily;