It was very early, but May was in the garden. The sun was just rising and the morning glories on the back porch turned their purple and rose and white cups to catch the welcome light. The sky was full of rosy clouds; dew glittered on the waving grass and dancing flowers, and the birds were singing as they only sing at dawn.

"What a lovely world this is!" cried May aloud. "If my uncle liked me I should be almost too happy this morning."

"He doesn't dislike you, dear," said Sarah, who had come up softly behind May and had thus overheard her words. May grasped her kind friend by the hand and said, earnestly,—

"I thought that I wouldn't apologize. I have changed my mind, or the dark changed it for me. I think it is perfectly wonderful, how the dark, so still and black, will make you willing to do things that you've said ever so many times in the daytime that you wouldn't do! I am going to apologize because I'm ashamed of myself. Not because he shut me up in my room—I hope he will understand that. I got up early to get braced up for it by the air, and the flowers and the morning."

Sarah understood the feeling that prompted May's early rising; the hours just after dawn have more of inspiration in them than a whole library of books about right living and thinking.

"The General is in the library; why don't you go now?" asked Sarah, brightly.

"I will; and I will be as full of good humor as father and as gentle as mother."

This was undertaking a good deal, but May was in earnest; and to be in earnest is to be armed against almost any enemy.

Much to her own surprise Sarah bent and kissed the mock boy. "Now scamper!" said she. "And come and tell me how well you have kept your word."

The General was reading. A hundred lines of Greek before breakfast was his daily appetizer and he had just completed fifty when May slid into the room.

"Good morning, Uncle Harold!" said she.

"Good morning, my young sir," said the General, with a smile, for "the dark" had worked its marvels with him as well as with May.

The smile settled it!—as a smile will often settle trifling differences if it be allowed—May did not wait for further advances, but sprang into the General's arms and promptly kissed him! The General was amazed, and showed it. He had never been kissed by a child, and his sensations when May's fresh, dewy lips were laid on his were bewildering in their variety. He was embarrassed, of course, for old bachelors are not used to kisses; he was saddened, too, but he was not displeased, and May knew it.

Suddenly a sense of the difference between his life as it was, with its calm, but narrow routine of pleasures, its moments of dulness unbrightened by the companionship of wife and the warm lips and clinging arms of children, and the life that might have been his had he not allowed his youth to slip past him, awoke in him a sting of disgust, of self-pity.

"I hope you are not offended," May said, timidly, for the General's silence was oppressive. "We always kiss mother and father good morning—and—I thought you might like to be treated as well."

"I do like being 'treated as well,'" said the General, heartily.

"I didn't come in for just that; I came to tell you that I am sorry I was so rude to you yesterday. I hope you will excuse me."

"Certainly I will."

"I remembered last night that mother once said something about what people ought to do when they were guests in anybody's house. She said it to Alice, not to me, but it was something like this: 'No matter how disagreeable people are when you are visiting them you must always bear it and never resent or mention it to anybody'—and I don't mean to again."

This ingenuous statement amused the General vastly. "That is excellent advice and worthy of your good mother," said he.

"Mother's advice is always excellent," said May, proudly. "When it is hard to take, the way she says it—so calm and sweet—takes the sting out. I don't think we need to learn much except what mother tells us."

"Always think so, my boy," said the General, brokenly.

"Your mother must have been like mine," hazarded May. "How much you must have loved her!"

To speak of his beloved mother was to make a short cut to the General's heart, and at that moment May could have demanded and received any boon of him.

"You were reading when I came in," said May, after a brief pause. "I hope I am not interrupting you."

"Not at all; I learned my lesson fifty years ago and I have not forgotten it."

"What were you reading?" asked May, who was a sad chatterbox when at ease.

"I was reading a classic—do you know what that means?"

"Oh, yes; a classic is a book in a leather binding. Alice studies in them, and I think there must be something very sad inside for I've often seen her crying over them."

"Classics are touching tales to youth. What would you think, Gay, of a goddess who corrected her children with a thunderbolt?"

"I should think that must have been worse than nurse's slipper. What was the goddess' name?"

"Juno."

"Did Juno call her thunderbolt a 'persuader'? That's what nurse called her slipper. Mother wouldn't let nurse use it and nurse didn't like it very well. She said it had been used on little Lord Roslyn and I guess she really thought it was too good to use on us because we haven't titles. But mother didn't believe in a persuader, even if it had persuaded a little English lord, and I'm sure we didn't!"

"I should say not!"

"Oh, Uncle Harold, I came near forgetting to tell you that my training can begin any time you like. I think father will be delighted if I go home with all my defects remedied."

"We will begin right after breakfast," said the General, delighted with this acquiescence.

"Breakfast is ready, sir," said Phyllis at the door.

"Phyllis," cried May in delight, "my uncle has forgiven me, and we are friends—great friends, aren't we, Uncle Harold?"

"Yes, my boy."

"Well," said Phyllis to herself, "it does beat the Dutch how that boy twists round a body's heart!"

"I'm a little hungry, aren't you?" suggested May, with a smile.

Extraordinary spell of a child's face—of its candid smile! The General forgot his dignity, his rigid ideas of deportment; he bent and kissed May's brow, then he said, "Come, dear."

These were strange words for him to speak; he had never said "dear" in his life except as he had coupled it with mother, and he said it under his breath.

May got down from the General's knees and took his hand. "We will go this way to show Miss Sarah that we are friends—I told her that I thought you didn't like me."

As they went along, hand in hand, the General felt awkward. It was the simplest thing in the world to make an excuse for withdrawing his hand, but like many simple things this was hard to do. May's fingers clung to his, and they seemed to have some mysterious connection with May's kiss; both were seals of the new bond between them.

"Miss Sarah!" cried May at the dining-room door, "look at us! You wouldn't think we were the enemies of yesterday, would you? Well, we are not. We are true friends, now—and the training is going to begin right after breakfast."

The training had already begun on both sides.