Next to discovering things did he love telling them,
and it would be hard to say which enjoyed that ensuing half-hour more--
Crooked Jack or the Old Lady.
Crooked Jack's account, boiled down, amounted to this; both Miss Gray's
parents had died when she was a baby, she had been brought up by an aunt,
she was very poor and very ambitious.
"Wants a moosical eddication," finished up Crooked Jack, "and, by jingo,
she orter have it, for anything like the voice of her I never heerd.
She sung for us that evening after supper and I thought 'twas
an angel singing. It just went through me like a shaft o' light.
The Spencer young ones are crazy over her already. She's got twenty
pupils around here and in Grafton and Avonlea."
When the Old Lady had found out everything Crooked Jack
could tell her, she went into the house and sat down by
the window of her little sitting-room to think it all over.
She was tingling from head to foot with excitement.
Leslie's daughter! This Old Lady had had her romance once.
Long ago--forty years ago--she had been engaged to Leslie Gray,
a young college student who taught in Spencervale for the summer
term one year--the golden summer of Margaret Lloyd's life.
Leslie had been a shy, dreamy, handsome fellow with literary
ambitions, which, as he and Margaret both firmly believed,
would one day bring him fame and fortune.
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