She sidled toward me. "Do you know what you have to do for yesterday?" she queried. "No," I said, with some misgiving, thinking that possibly my behavior had been reported to the Lanes to my disadvantage. "Gwandma says when a young la-dy saves a young gen-tle-man, he-has-to-mawwy-her," she said, speaking very slowly at first, but finishing her sentence with a little run. "So you have to mawwy me." She was beside me now, and her face was radiant with the excitement of her secret. "But I can't marry you! Only grown-ups do that!" I protested. "Won't we be gwown-ups some day?" "I guess so," I admitted. And then with a sudden burst of resolution I added, "And then I'll marry you." She held her face up to me and I leaned over and kissed it shyly. Then, hand in hand, we retraced our way down the cow-path, along the rows of sprouting corn, by the stables and past our house. Jean led me to her own home, which was next to ours, down the road. "You have to ask Mama," she said, as our little figures dropped their shadows across Mrs. Lane's kitchen floor. This was more than I had bargained for. I was beginning to discover that Miss Jean was a young woman of action as well as decision. But I was game. "Mrs. Lane," I said, bracing my chubby legs for the ordeal, "I-want-to-marry-Jean." Jean's mother looked at me with a smile that broadened until it broke into open laughter. "I am afraid you are very precocious children," she remarked. I didn't know what that meant, but she gave us each a doughnut, and we went away happy, Jean twirling hers on her finger for a wedding ring. CHAPTER II. That same summer I began going to school. Perhaps I should say that John Lane and I began going to school, as it was something of a joint adventure. We talked of it together for weeks before the great event. At that time my objective in life, in so far as I had one, was to be a locomotive engineer, but John had elected to be the owner of a woolen mill--blandly overlooking the little question of capital--and we discussed our school training in the light of these ambitions. On the eventful morning I remember my father coming into the loft and leaning over my bed, where I feigned sleep. "Puir wee mannie," I heard him say, dropping into the Scotch tongue which he reserved for moments of emotion, "it's a long road he's starting on, and a hard one, too, or he'll no be like the rest o' us." My mother scoured me well and dressed me in a clean new suit and took my cheeks between her hands and kissed me, and told me to work hard and grow up a good man like my father. At the gate I met John, and together we started down the turnpike of life.