E-text prepared by David Clarke, Mary Meehan,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(/)
CHAPTER I. A Letter
CHAPTER II. Talking it Over.
CHAPTER III. Ruth's Decision
CHAPTER IV. The Journey
CHAPTER V. Cousins
CHAPTER VI. Stonegate
CHAPTER VII. A Poor Relation
CHAPTER VIII. Sea-side Pleasures
CHAPTER IX. The Picnic
CHAPTER X. Busyborough
CHAPTER XI. School-girl Gossip
CHAPTER XII. Julia's Humiliation
CHAPTER XIII. Hard at Work
CHAPTER XIV. An Adventure
CHAPTER XV. Examination
CHAPTER XVI. A Downward Step
CHAPTER XVII. The Prize
CHAPTER XVIII. So as by Fire
CHAPTER XIX. Living it Down
CHAPTER XX. Home Again
School was over, and the holidays were beginning once more, summerholidays, with all their promise of pleasure for dwellers in thecountry. The scent of sweet new hay was borne on the afternoon breeze,and the broad sunlight lay on fields of waving corn which would soon beready for the sickle, and on green meadows from which the hay was beingcarried.
Ruth Arnold slowly wended her way home-wards along the hot dusty road,turned down a shady green lane, opened a little gate and walked up thegarden path; and then, instead of running indoors as usual, she sat downin the little rose-covered porch and looked rather thoughtfully at thebook in her hand.
It was a new book, a prize which had been awarded her that afternoon;but she felt very little pride in it, for she had known all through thehalf-year that the prize would be hers unless she was very idle or lazy.Nor did she anticipate much pleasure in reading it, for it was only anew English grammar, and grammar was not a study in which she feltparticularly interested at that moment.
It was not often that Ruth sat down to think, for she was a merry livelygirl; but this afternoon she felt rather discontented with her lot. Thetruth was that she had been at Miss Green's school, the only one in thevillage, ever since she was six years old; and now she had turnedfourteen, and began to feel some contempt for the elementary catechismswhich had been her only lesson-books, and which were certainly notcalculated to make learning