the boys' sports with his usual energy, meaning that their last Saturday with him should be their merriest; but he went through his part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began to dip toward the rim of the woods.
He was standing on the ice, where the river widened just below the house, when a jingle of bells broke on the still air, and he saw a sleigh driven rapidly up the avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise. Who, at that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of Hopewood? The sleigh halted near the closed house, and a muffled figure, alighting alone, began to move down the snowy slope toward the skaters.
In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding up the bank. He would have known the figure anywhere—known that lovely poise of the head, the mixture of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which even the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the house they met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand. Face and lips, as she stood above him, glowed with her swift passage through the evening air, and in the blaze of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.
"I drove out to find you—they told me you were here—I arrived this morning, quite suddenly. … "
She broke off, as though the encounter had checked her ardour instead of kindling it; but he drew no discouragement from her tone.
"I hoped you would come before I left—I knew you would!" he exclaimed; and at his last words her face clouded anxiously.
"I didn't know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday—the day before—I got a letter. … " Again she wavered, perceptibly trusting her difficulty to him, in the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he answered with recovered energy: "The great thing is that you should be here."
She shook her head at his optimism. "What can I do if you go?"
"You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you a little about some of the loose ends I am leaving."
"But why are you leaving them? I don't understand. Is it inevitable?"
"Inevitable," he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction in the word; and as her eyes besought him, he added, smiling: "I've been dismissed, you see; and from the manager's standpoint I think I deserved it. But the best part of my work needn't go with me—and that is what I should like to speak to you about. As assistant manager I can easily be replaced—have been, I understand, already; but among these boys here I should like to think that a little of me stayed—and it will, if you'll let me tell you what I've been doing."
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