Ande did try Tom's advice, and was gratified to see that, with the exception of Bully Bob Sloan, all the village lads improved in their conduct toward him. The rescue of Mistress Alice was soon noised abroad, and he was considered almost in the light of a hero by the juvenile element. One evening, as the lad was returning from the furze croft, he noticed a chaise and pony at his mother's door. It was the chaise of Mistress Alice, who had, since the affair with Queeny, betaken herself to the pony and chaise when desiring an airing. His mother had received her with a certain amount of cold dignity which her feelings would scarcely allow her to conceal. There was a variety of emotions in the lad's breast as he approached. There was anger at Squire Vivian's indignity to him, a feeling of shame at the report of his depredations, and an emotion that had lived in his soul for quite a time, but which he had never fully analysed. From early childhood he had remembered the squire's daughter. He remembered, with all a youth's tenacity, how he was led to church by the tall, soldierly man, his father, and how rapidly he had to move his infantile feet to keep up with the soldier's tread. In the family pew he would sometimes turn his head to a nice dark-haired little miss of a few summers' age, seated in Squire Vivian's pew. Once she had shyly and demurely returned his look, then quickly turned away, as if displeased. He had asked his father afterward whether he didn't think the squire's girl a "pretty little maid," and he remembered the hearty roar of laughter with which his father responded. Since he had been attending the parish school, he had not seen her much. Indeed, he had never become acquainted with her before the affair of the runaway. He had always admired those dark elfin locks, and in church he had thought if he had one of them how he would cherish it, and then he had flushed crimson at what he thought almost a profanation. He had always admired her, but the feeling he had had for quite a time past could neither be admiration nor friendship. He had not analysed it. It was this strange sentiment that had led him frequently into the vicinity of the Manor, before the regrettable affair of the stocks. His appearance there on the evening of the killing of the mastiff was an incident of that kind. He had conceived a passion for flowers, and especially for the flowers of a garden plot, watered and attended by the hand of Mistress Alice. Could he secure one of those blossoms? Now, Ande was the perfect soul of honour, but he had had a hard fight with himself to keep from appropriating what was not his own. The slightness of the offence, the intensity of his feelings, the heritage of his ancestors, all urged the harmlessness of the deed. He might have secured one by request, but he would have died before exposing his feelings to ridicule.