`` Sylvia Gray , '' said Crooked Jack . The Old Lady 's heart gave another great bound . But she had known it -- she had known that girl with Leslie Gray 's hair and eyes and laugh must be Leslie Gray 's daughter . Crooked Jack spat on his hand and resumed his work , but his tongue went faster than his spade , and the Old Lady listened greedily . For the first time she enjoyed and blessed Crooked Jack 's garrulity and gossip . Every word he uttered was as an apple of gold in a picture of silver to her . He had been working at William Spencer 's the day the new music teacher had come , and what Crooked Jack could n't find out about any person in one whole day -- at least as far as outward life went -- was hardly worth finding out . 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 't was 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 .
Then there had been a foolish , bitter quarrel at the end XXXXX that golden summer .
For around as at in of over through to with