"But they have no right to," cried Katy. "I want to see Alvin. He will make it right, I am sure he will make it right. He is older than I!" Katy spoke as though this fact were only now known to her. "He has no right--" But Katy went no further: her love had been already sufficiently bruised and cheapened. "I have tied myself up in a knot! I have done it myself!"
Katy looked down upon the Hartman house. Rumor said that Mrs. Hartman was failing; the rare visitors to her kitchen found her on the settle in midday.
"It is nothing but dying in the world," mourned Katy. "We grow up like grass and are cut down."
But Katy had now no time to think of the Hartmans. She went on up the mountain road until she reached the Koehler house. The walls needed a coat of whitewash, the fences were brown, the garden was overgrown. It was a mean little place in its disorder.
"He never had a chance," protested Katy in answer to some inward accusation. Then Katy went drearily home.
By the first of June Alvin had still not written; by the end of June Katy was still looking for a letter. The term of the normal school had closed; it was time for him to be at home. Surely he could not mean to stay away forever!
Day after day Katy's relatives watched her solicitously, expecting her grief to soften, her old spirits to return; day by day Katy grew more silent, more depressed. Uncle Edwin now attacked her boldly.
"Do you forget how smart the governor thought you were, Katy?" Or, "It was bad enough for your gran'mom that you couldn't go to school for two years, Katy, but this would be much worse for her."
In July Uncle Edwin took fresh courage and began to reproach her. If she was going to school, no time must be lost, they must make plans, she must have an outfit.
"David Hartman is at home," said he. "He will be very learned. He is smart. But he is not so smart as you, Katy. Do you forget how you were up to him in school and he is older than you?"
Katy swallowed her coffee with a mighty effort.
"And Alvin Koehler was here to-day," went on Uncle Edwin. "He wants that the directors should give him the Millerstown school, now that Carpenter is no longer here. We think he should have it while he comes from Millerstown. He has made a good deal of himself. You would be surprised to see him. But you are much smarter than he, Katy!"