"HERE, Tillie, you take and go up to Sister Jennie Hershey's and get some mush. I'm makin' fried mush fur supper," said Aunty Em, bustling into the hotel kitchen where her niece was paring potatoes, one Saturday afternoon. "Here's a quarter. Get two pound."

"Oh, Tillie," called her cousin Rebecca from the adjoining dining-room, which served also as the family sitting-room, "hurry on and you'll mebbe be in time to see the stage come in with the new teacher in. Mebbe you'll see him to speak to yet up at Hershey's."

"Lizzie Hershey's that wonderful tickled that the teacher's going to board at their place!" said Amanda, the second daughter, a girl of Tillie's age, as she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Tillie put on her black hood over the white Mennonite cap. Stout Aunty Em also wore the Mennonite dress, which lent a certain dignity to her round face with its alert but kindly eyes; but her two daughters were still "of the world's people."

"When Lizzie she tole me about it, comin' out from Lancaster after market this morning," continued Amanda, "she was now that tickled! She sayed he's such a good-looker! Och, I wisht he was stoppin' here; ain't, Tillie? Lizzie'll think herself much, havin' a town fellah stoppin' at their place."

"If he's stoppin' at Hershey's," said Rebecca, appearing suddenly, "that ain't sayin' he has to get in with Lizzie so wonderful thick! I hope he's a JOLLY fellah."

Amanda and Rebecca were now girls of seventeen and eighteen years—buxom, rosy, absolutely unideal country lasses. Beside them, frail little Tillie seemed a creature of another clay.

"Lizzie tole me: she sayed how he come up to their market-stall in there at Lancaster this morning," Amanda related, "and tole her he'd heard Jonas Hershey's pork-stall at market was where he could mebbe find out a place he could board at in New Canaan with a private family—he'd sooner live with a private family that way than at the HOtel. Well, Lizzie she coaxed her pop right there in front of the teacher to say THEY'd take him, and Jonas Hershey he sayed HE didn't care any. So Lizzie she tole him then he could come to their place, and he sayed he'd be out this after in the four-o'clock stage."

"Well, and I wonder what her mother has to say to her and Jonas fixin' it up between 'em to take a boarder and not waitin' to ast HER!" Aunty Em said. "I guess mebbe Sister Jennie's spited!"

The appellation of "sister" indicated no other relation than that of the Mennonite church membership, Mrs. Jonas Hershey being also a New Mennonite.

"Now don't think you have to run all the way there and back, Tillie," was her aunt's parting injunction. "I don't time you like what your pop does! Well, I guess not! I take notice you're always out of breath when you come back from an urrand. It's early yet—you dare stop awhile and talk to Lizzie."

Tillie gave her aunt a look of grateful affection as she left the house. Often when she longed to thank her for her many little acts of kindness, the words would not come. It was the habit of her life to repress every emotion of her mind, whether of bitterness or pleasure, and an unconquerable shyness seized upon her in any least attempt to reveal herself to those who were good to her.

It was four o'clock on a beautiful October afternoon as she walked up the village street, and while she enjoyed, through all her sensitive maiden soul, the sweet sunshine and soft autumn coloring, her thought dwelt with a pleasant expectancy on her almost inevitable meeting with "the Teacher," if he did indeed arrive in the stage now due at New Canaan.

Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie Hershey, Tillie's eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a feminine hunger for romance. Life as yet had not revealed those emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss Margaret—which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment. It was only because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to become "educated" that she was interested in his coming.

It was but a few minutes' walk to the home of Jonas Hershey, the country pork butcher. As Tillie turned in at the gate, she heard, with a leap of her heart, the distant rumble of the approaching stagecoach.

Jonas Hershey's home was probably the cleanest, neatest-looking red brick house in all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds, almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across the garden to the side door which opened into the kitchen. It stood open and she stepped in without ceremony. For a moment she could see nothing but red and yellow flowers and whitewashed clam-shells. But as her vision cleared, she perceived her neighbor, Lizzie Hershey, a well-built, healthy-looking country lass of eighteen years, cutting bread at a table, and her mother, a large fat woman wearing the Mennonite dress, standing before a huge kitchen range, stirring "ponhaus" in a caldron.

The immaculate neatness of the large kitchen gave evidence, as did garden, board-walk, and front porch, of that morbid passion for "cleaning up" characteristic of the Dutch housewife.

Jonas Hershey did a very large and lucrative business, and the work of his establishment was heavy. But he hired no "help" and his wife and daughter worked early and late to aid him in earning the dollars which he hoarded.

"Sister Jennie!" Tillie accosted Mrs. Hershey with the New Mennonite formal greeting, "I wish you the grace and peace of the Lord."

"The same to you, sister," Mrs. Hershey replied, bending to receive Tillie's kiss as the girl came up to her at the stove—the Mennonite interpretation of the command, "Salute the brethren with a holy kiss."

"Well, Lizzie," was Tillie's only greeting to the girl at the table. Lizzie was not a member of meeting and the rules forbade the members to kiss those who were still in the world.

"Well, Tillie," answered Lizzie, not looking up from the bread she was cutting.

Tillie instantly perceived a lack of cordiality. Something was wrong. Lizzie's face was sullen and her mother's countenance looked grim and determined. Tillie wondered whether their evident ill-humor were in any way connected with herself, or whether her Aunty Em's surmise were correct, and Sister Jennie was really "spited."

"I've come to get two pound of mush," she said, remembering her errand.

"It's all," Mrs. Hershey returned. "We solt every cake at market, and no more's made yet. It was all a'ready till market was only half over."

"Aunty Em'll be disappointed. She thought she'd make fried mush for supper," said Tillie.

"Have you strangers?" inquired Mrs. Hershey.

"No, we haven't anybody for supper, unless some come on the stage this after. We had four for dinner."

"Were they such agents, or what?" asked Lizzie.

Tillie turned to her. "Whether they were agents? No, they were just pleasure-seekers. They were out for a drive and stopped off to eat."

At this instant the rattling old stage-coach drew up at the gate.

The mother and daughter, paying no heed whatever to the sound, went on with their work, Mrs. Hershey looking a shade more grimly determined as she stirred her ponhaus and Lizzie more sulky.

Tillie had just time to wonder whether she had better slip out before the stranger came in, when a knock on the open kitchen door checked her.

Neither mother nor daughter glanced up in answer to the knock. Mrs. Hershey resolutely kept her eyes on her caldron as she turned her big spoon about in it, and Lizzie, with sullen, averted face, industriously cut her loaf.

A second knock, followed by the appearance of a good-looking, well-dressed young man on the threshold, met with the same reception. Tillie, in the background, and hidden by the stove, looked on wonderingly.

The young man glanced, in evident mystification, at the woman by the stove and at the girl at the table, and a third time rapped loudly.

"Good afternoon!" he said pleasantly, an inquiring note in his voice.

Mrs. Hershey and Lizzie went on with their work as though they had not heard him.

He took a step into the room, removing his hat. "You were expecting me this afternoon, weren't you?" he asked.

"This is the place," Lizzie remarked at last.

"You were looking for me?" he repeated.

Mrs. Hershey suddenly turned upon Lizzie. "Why don't you speak?" she inquired half-tauntingly. "You spoke BEFORE."

Tillie realized that Sister Jennie must be referring to Lizzie's readiness at market that morning to "speak," in making her agreement with the young man for board.

"You spoke this morning," the mother repeated. "Why can't you speak now?"

"Och, why don't you speak yourself?" retorted Lizzie. "It ain't fur ME to speak!"

The stranger appeared to recognize that he was the subject of a domestic unpleasantness.

"You find it inconvenient to take me to board?" he hesitatingly inquired of Mrs. Hershey. "I shouldn't think of wishing to intrude. There is a hotel in the place, I suppose?"

"Yes. There IS a HOtel in New Canaan."

"I can get board there, no doubt?"

"Well," Mrs. Hershey replied argumentatively, "that's a public house and this ain't. We never made no practice of takin' boarders. To be sure, Jonas he always was FUR boarders. But I AIN'T fur!"

"Oh, yes," gravely nodded the young man. "Yes. I see."

He picked up the dress-suit case which he had set on the sill. "Where is the hotel, may I ask?"

"Just up the road a piece. You can see the sign out," said Mrs. Hershey, while Lizzie banged the bread-box shut with an energy forcibly expressive of her feelings.

"Thank you," responded the gentleman, a pair of keen, bright eyes sweeping Lizzie's gloomy face.

He bowed, put his hat on his head and stepped out of the house.

There was a back door at the other side of the kitchen. Not stopping for the ceremony of leave-taking, Tillie slipped out of it to hurry home before the stranger should reach the hotel.

Her heart beat fast as she hurried across fields by a short-cut, and there was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. Her ears were tingling with sounds to which they were unaccustomed, and which thrilled them exquisitely—the speech, accent, and tones of one who belonged to that world unknown to her except through books—out of which Miss Margaret had come and to which this new teacher, she at once recognized, belonged. Undoubtedly he was what was called, by magazine-writers and novel-writers, a "gentleman." And it was suddenly revealed to Tillie that in real life the phenomenon thus named was even more interesting than in literature. The clean cut of the young man's thin face, his pale forehead, the fineness of the white hand he had lifted to his hat, his modulated voice and speech, all these things had, in her few minutes' observation of him, impressed themselves instantly and deeply upon the girl's fresh imagination.

Out of breath from her hurried walk, she reached the back door of the hotel several minutes before the teacher's arrival. She had just time to report to her aunt that Sister Jennie's mush was "all," and to reply in the affirmative to the eager questions of Amanda and Rebecca as to whether she had seen the teacher, when the sound of the knocker on the front door arrested their further catechism.

"The stage didn't leave out whoever it is—it drove right apast," said Aunty Em. "You go, Tillie, and see oncet who is it."

Tillie was sure that she had not been seen by the evicted applicant for board, as she had been hidden behind the stove. This impression was confirmed when she now opened the door to him, for there was no recognition in his eyes as he lifted his hat. It was the first time in Tillie's life that a man had taken off his hat to her, and it almost palsied her tongue as she tried to ask him to come in.

In reply to his inquiry as to whether he could get board here, she led him into the darkened parlor at the right of a long hall. Groping her way across the floor to the window she drew up the blind.

"Just sit down," she said timidly. "I'll call Aunty Em."

"Thank you," he bowed with a little air of ceremony that for an instant held her spellbound. She stood staring at him—only recalled to herself and to a sense of shame for her rudeness by the sudden entrance of her aunt.

"How d' do?" said Mrs. Wackernagel in her brisk, businesslike tone. "D'you want supper?"

"I am the applicant for the New Canaan school. I want to get board for the winter here, if I can—and in case I'm elected."

"Well, I say! Tillie! D'you hear that? Why us we all heard you was goin' to Jonas Hershey's."

"They decided it wasn't convenient to take me and sent me here."

"Now think! If that wasn't like Sister Jennie yet! All right!" she announced conclusively. "We can accommodate you to satisfaction, I guess."

"Have you any other boarders?" the young man inquired.

"No reg'lar boarders—except, to be sure, the Doc; and he's lived with us it's comin' fifteen years, I think, or how long, till November a'ready. It's just our own fam'ly here and my niece where helps with the work, and the Doc. We have a many to meals though, just passing through that way, you know. We don't often have more 'n one reg'lar boarder at oncet, so we just make 'em at home still, like as if they was one of us. Now YOU," she hospitably concluded, "we'll lay in our best bed. We don't lay 'em in the best bed unless they're some clean-lookin'."

Tillie noticed as her aunt talked that while the young man listened with evident interest, his eyes moved about the room, taking in every detail of it. To Tillie's mind, this hotel parlor was so "pleasing to the eye" as to constitute one of those Temptations of the Enemy against which her New Mennonite faith prescribed most rigid discipline. She wondered whether the stranger did not think it very handsome.

The arrangement of the room was evidently, like Jonas Hershey's flower-beds, the work of a mathematical genius. The chairs all stood with their stiff backs squarely against the wall, the same number facing each other from the four sides of the apartment. Photographs in narrow oval frames, six or eight, formed another oval, all equidistant from the largest, which occupied the dead center, not only of this group, but of the wall from which it depended. The books on the square oak table, which stood in the exact middle of the floor, were arranged in cubical piles in the same rigid order. Tillie saw the new teacher's glance sweep their titles: "Touching Incidents, and Remarkable Answers to Prayer"; "From Tannery to White House"; "Gems of Religious Thought," by Talmage; "History of the Galveston Horror; Illustrated"; "Platform Echoes, or Living Truths for Heart and Head," by John B. Gough.

"Lemme see—your name's Fairchilds, ain't?" the landlady abruptly asked.

"Yes," bowed the young man.

"Will you, now, take it all right if I call you by your Christian name? Us Mennonites daresent call folks Mr. and Mrs. because us we don't favor titles. What's your first name now?"

Mr. Fairchilds considered the question with the appearance of trying to remember. "You'd better call me Pestalozzi," he answered, with a look and tone of solemnity.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel exclaimed. "Well, now think! That's a name where ain't familiar 'round here. Is it after some of your folks?"

"It was a name I think I bore in a previous incarnation as a teacher of youth," Fairchilds gravely replied.

Mrs. Waekernagel looked blank. "Tillie!" she appealed to her niece, who had shyly stepped half behind her, "do you know right what he means?"

Tillie dumbly shook her head.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel experimented with the unfamiliar name. "Don't it, now, beat all! It'll take me awhile till I'm used to that a'ready. Mebbe I'll just call you Teacher; ain't?"

She looked at him inquiringly, expecting an answer. "Ain't!" she repeated in her vigorous, whole-souled way.

"Eh—ain't WHAT?" Fairchilds asked, puzzled.

"Och, I just mean, SAY NOT? Can't you mebbe talk English wery good? We had such a foreigners at this HOtel a'ready. We had oncet one, he was from Phil'delphy and he didn't know what we meant right when we sayed, 'The butter's all any more.' He'd ast like you, 'All what?' Yes, he was that dumm! Och, well," she added consolingly, "people can't help fur their dispositions, that way!"

"And what must I call you?" the young man inquired.

"My name's Wackernagel."

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Well, I guess not MISS anyhow! I'm the mother of four!"

"Oh, excuse me!"

"Oh, that's all right!" responded Mrs. Wackernagel, amiably. "Well, I must go make supper now. You just make yourself at home that way."

"May I go to my room?"

"Now?" asked Mrs. Wackernagel, incredulously. "Before night?"

"To unpack my dress-suit case," the young man explained. "My trunk will be brought out to-morrow on the stage."

"All right. If you want. But we ain't used to goin' up-stairs in the daytime. Tillie, you take his satchel and show him up. This is my niece, Tillie Getz."

Again Mr. Fairchilds bowed to the girl as his eyes rested on the fair face looking out from her white cap. Tillie bent her head in response, then stooped to pick up the suit case. But he interposed and took it from her hands—and the touch of chivalry in the act went to her head like wine.

She led the way up-stairs to the close, musty, best spare bedroom.



XV

THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME

At the supper-table, the apparently inexhaustible topic of talk was the refusal of the Hersheys to receive the new teacher into the bosom of their family. A return to this theme again and again, on the part of the various members of the Wackernagel household, did not seem to lessen its interest for them, though the teacher himself did not take a very animated part in its discussion. Tillie realized, as with an absorbing interest she watched his fine face, that all he saw and heard here was as novel to him as the world whence he had come would be to her and her kindred and neighbors, could they be suddenly transplanted into it. Tillie had never looked upon any human countenance which seemed to express so much of that ideal world in which she lived her real life.

"To turn him off after he got there!" Mrs. Wackernagel exclaimed, reverting for the third time to the episode which had so excited the family. "And after Lizzie and Jonas they'd sayed he could come yet!"

"Well, I say!" Mr. Wackernagel shook his head, as though the story, even at its third recital, were full of surprises.

Mr. Wackernagel was a tall, raw-boned man with conspicuously large feet and hands. He wore his hair plastered back from his face in a unique, not to say distinguished style, which he privately considered highly becoming his position as the proprietor of the New Canaan Hotel. Mr. Wackernagel's self-satisfaction did indeed cover every detail of his life—from the elegant fashion of his hair to the quality of the whisky which he sold over the bar, and of which he never tired of boasting. Not only was he entirely pleased with himself, but his good-natured satisfaction included all his possessions—his horse first, then his wife, his two daughters, his permanent boarder, "the Doc," and his wife's niece Tillie. For people outside his own horizon, he had a tolerant but contemptuous pity.

Mr. Wackernagel and the doctor both sat at table in their shirt-sleeves, the proprietor wearing a clean white shirt (his extravagance and vanity in using two white shirts a week being one of the chief historical facts of the village), while the doctor was wont to appear in a brown cotton shirt, the appearance of which suggested the hostler rather than the physician.

That Fairchilds should "eat in his coat" placed him, in the eyes of the Wackernagels, on the high social plane of the drummers from the city, many of whom yearly visited the town with their wares.

"And Teacher he didn't press 'em none, up at Jonas Hershey's, to take him in, neither, he says," Mrs. Wackernagel pursued.

"He says?" repeated Mr. Wackernagel, inquiringly. "Well, that's like what I was, too, when I was a young man," he boasted. "If I thought I ain't wanted when I went to see a young lady—if she passed any insinyations—she never wasn't worried with ME ag'in!"

"I guess Lizzie's spited that Teacher's stoppin' at our place," giggled Rebecca, her pretty face rosy with pleasurable excitement in the turn affairs had taken. She sat directly opposite Mr. Fairchilds, while Amanda had the chair at his side.

Tillie could see that the young man's eyes rested occasionally upon the handsome, womanly form of her very good-looking cousin Amanda. Men always looked at Amanda a great deal, Tillie had often observed. The fact had never before had any special significance for her.

"Are you from Lancaster, or wherever?" the doctor inquired of Mr. Fairchilds.

"From Connecticut," he replied in a tone that indefinably, but unmistakably checked further questioning.

"Now think! So fur off as that!"

"Yes, ain't!" exclaimed Mrs. Wackernagel. "It's a wonder a body'd ever be contented to live that fur off."

"We're had strangers here in this HOtel," Mr. Wackernagel began to brag, while he industriously ate of his fried sausage and fried potatoes, "from as fur away as Illinois yet! And from as fur south as down in Maine! Yes, indeed! Ain't, mom?" he demanded of his wife.

"Och, yes, many's the strange meals I cooked a'ready in this house. One week I cooked forty strange meals; say not, Abe?" she returned.

"Yes, I mind of that week. It was Mrs. Johnson and her daughter we had from Illinois and Mrs. Snyder from Maine," Abe explained to Mr. Fairchilds. "And them Johnsons stayed the whole week."

"They stopped here while Mr. Johnson went over the county sellin' milk-separators," added Mrs. Wackernagel. "And Abe he was in Lancaster that week, and the Doc he was over to East Donegal, and there was no man here except only us ladies! Do you mind, Rebecca?"

Eebecca nodded, her mouth too full for utterance.

"Mrs. Johnson she looked younger than her own daughter yet," Mrs. Wackernagel related, with animation, innocent of any suspicion that the teacher might not find the subject of Mrs. Johnson as absorbing as she found it.

"There is nothing like good health as a preserver of youth," responded Fairchilds.

"HOtel-keepin' didn't pay till we got the license," Mr. Wackernagel chatted confidentially to the stranger. "Mom, to be sure, she didn't favor my havin' a bar, because she belonged to meetin'. But I seen I couldn't make nothin' if I didn't. It was never no temptation to me—I was always among the whisky and I never got tight oncet. And it ain't the hard work farmin' was. I had to give up followin' farmin'. I got it so in my leg. Why, sometimes I can't hardly walk no more."

"And can't your doctor cure you?" Fairchilds asked, with a curious glance at the unkempt little man across the table.

"Och, yes, he's helped me a heap a'ready. Him he's as good a doctor as any they're got in Lancaster even!" was the loyal response. "Here a couple months back, a lady over in East Donegal Township she had wrote him a letter over here, how the five different kinds of doses where he give her daughter done her so much good, and she was that grateful, she sayed she just felt indebted fur a letter to him! Ain't, Doc? She sayed now her daughter's engaged to be married and her mind's more settled—and to be sure, that made somepin too. Yes, she sayed her gettin' engaged done her near as much good as the five different kind of doses done her."

"Are you an Allopath?" Fairchilds asked the doctor.

"I'm a Eclectic," he responded glibly. "And do you know, Teacher, I'd been practisin' that there style of medicine fur near twelve years before I knowed it was just to say the Eclectic School, you understand."

"Like Moliere's prose-writer!" remarked the teacher, then smiled at himself for making such an allusion in such a place.

"Won't you have some more sliced radishes, Teacher?" urged the hostess. "I made a-plenty."

"No, I thank you," Fairchilds replied, with his little air of courtesy that so impressed the whole family. "I can't eat radishes in the evening with impunity."

"But these is with WINEGAR," Mrs. Wackernagel corrected him.

Before Mr. Fairchilds could explain, Mr. Wackernagel broke in, confirming the doctor's proud claim.

"Yes, Doc he's a Eclectic," he repeated, evidently feeling that the fact reflected credit on the hotel. "You can see his sign on the side door."

"I was always interested in science," explained the doctor, under the manifest impression that he was continuing the subject. "Phe-non-e-ma. That's what I like. Odd things. I'm stuck on 'em! Now this here wireless teleGRAPHY. I'm stuck on that, you bet! To me that there's a phe-non-e-ma."

"Teacher," interrupted Mrs. Wackernagel, "you ain't eatin' hearty. Leave me give you some more sausage."

"If you please," Mr. Fairchilds bowed as he handed his plate to her.

"Why don't you leave him help hisself," protested Mr. Wackernagel. "He won't feel to make hisself at home if he can't help hisself like as if he was one of us that way."

"Och, well," confessed Mrs. Wackernagel, "I just keep astin' him will he have more, so I can hear him speak his manners so nice." She laughed aloud at her own vanity. "You took notice of it too, Tillie, ain't? You can't eat fur lookin' at him!"

A tide of color swept Tillie's face as the teacher, with a look of amusement, turned his eyes toward her end of the table. Her glance fell upon her plate, and she applied herself to cutting up her untouched sausage.

"Now, there's Doc," remarked Amanda, critically, "he's GOT good manners, but he don't use 'em."

"Och," said the doctor, "it ain't worth while to trouble."

"I think it would be wonderful nice, Teacher," said Mrs. Wackernagel, "if you learnt them manners you got to your scholars this winter. I wisht 'Manda and Rebecca knowed such manners. THEY're to be your scholars this winter."

"Indeed?" said Fairchilds; "are they?"

"'Manda there," said her father, "she's so much fur actin' up you'll have to keep her right by you to keep her straight, still."

"That's where I shall be delighted to keep her," returned Fairchilds, gallantly, and Amanda laughed boisterously and grew several shades rosier as she looked boldly up into the young man's eyes.

"Ain't you fresh though!" she exclaimed coquettishly.

How dared they all make so free with this wonderful young man, marveled Tillie. Why didn't they realize, as she did, how far above them he was? She felt almost glad that in his little attentions to Amanda and Rebecca he had scarcely noticed her at all; for the bare thought of talking to him overwhelmed her with shyness.

"Mind Tillie!" laughed Mr. Wackernagel, suddenly, "lookin' scared at the way yous are all talkin' up to Teacher! Tillie she's afraid of you," he explained to Mr. Fairchilds. "She ain't never got her tongue with her when there's strangers. Ain't, Tillie?"

Tillie's burning face was bent over her plate, and she did not attempt to answer. Mr. Fairchilds' eyes rested for an instant on the delicate, sensitive countenance of the girl. But his attention was diverted by an abrupt exclamation from Mrs. Wackernagel.

"Oh, Abe!" she suddenly cried, "you ain't tole Teacher yet about the Albright sisters astin' you, on market, what might your name be!"

The tone in which this serious omission was mentioned indicated that it was an anecdote treasured among the family archives.

"Now, I would mebbe of forgot that!" almost in consternation said Mr. Wackernagel. "Well," he began, concentrating his attention upon the teacher, "it was this here way. The two Miss Albrights they had bought butter off of us, on market, for twenty years back a'ready, and all that time we didn't know what was their name, and they didn't know ourn; fur all, I often says to mom, 'Now I wonder what's the name of them two thin little women.' Well, you see, I was always a wonderful man fur my jokes. Yes, I was wery fond of makin' a joke, still. So here one day the two sisters come along and bought their butter, and then one of 'em she says, 'Excuse me, but here I've been buyin' butter off of yous fur this twenty years back a'ready and I ain't never heard your name. What might your name BE?' Now I was such a man fur my jokes, still, so I says to her"—Mr. Wackernagel's whole face twinkled with amusement, and his shoulders shook with laughter as he contemplated the joke he had perpetrated—"I says, 'Well, it MIGHT be Gener'l Jackson'"—laughter again choked his utterance, and the stout form of Mrs. Wackernagel also was convulsed with amusement, while Amanda and Rebecca giggled appreciatively. Tillie and the doctor alone remained unaffected. "'It might be Gener'l Jackson,' I says. 'But it ain't. It's Abe Wackernagel,' I says. You see," he explained, "she ast me what MIGHT my name be.—See?—and I says 'It might be Jackson'—MIGHT be, you know, because she put it that way, what might it be. 'But it ain't,' I says. 'It's Wackernagel.'"

Mr. and Mrs. Wackernagel and their daughters leaned back in their chairs and gave themselves up to prolonged and exuberant laughter, in which the teacher obligingly joined as well as he was able.

When this hilarity had subsided, Mr. Wackernagel turned to Mr. Fairchilds with a question. "Are you mebbe feelin' oneasy, Teacher, about meetin' the school directors to-night? You know they meet here in the HOtel parlor at seven o'clock to take a look at you; and if you suit, then you and them signs the agreement."

"And if I don't suit?"

"They'll turn you down and send you back home!" promptly answered the doctor. "That there Board ain't conferrin' William Penn on no one where don't suit 'em pretty good! They're a wonderful partic'lar Board!"

After supper the comely Amanda agreed eagerly to the teacher's suggestion that she go with him for a walk, before the convening of the School Board at seven o'clock, and show him the school-house, as he would like to behold, he said, "the seat of learning" which, if the Board elected him, was to be the scene of his winter's campaign.

Amanda improved this opportunity to add her word of warning to that of the doctor.

"That there Board's awful hard to suit, still. Oncet they got a Millersville Normal out here, and when she come to sign they seen she was near-sighted that way, and Nathaniel Puntz—he's a director—he up and says that wouldn't suit just so well, and they sent her back home. And here oncet a lady come out to apply and she should have sayed [she is reported to have said] she was afraid New Canaan hadn't no accommodations good enough fur her, and the directors ast her, 'Didn't most of our Presidents come out of log cabins?' So they wouldn't elect her. Now," concluded Amanda, "you see!"

"Thanks for your warning. Can you give me some pointers?"

"What's them again?"

"Well, I must not be near-sighted, for one thing, and I must not demand 'all the modern improvements.' Tell me what manner of man this School Board loves and admires. To be in the dark as to their tastes, you know—"

"You must make yourself nice and common," Amanda instructed him. "You haven't dare to put on no city airs. To be sure, I guess they come a good bit natural to you, and, as mom says still, a body can't help fur their dispositions; but our directors is all plain that way and they don't like tony people that wants to come out here and think they're much!"

"Yes? I see. Anything else?"

"Well, they'll be partic'lar about your bein' a perfessor."

"How do you mean?"

Amanda looked at him in astonishment. "If you're a perfessor or no. They'll be sure to ast you."

Mr. Fairchilds thoughtfully considered it.

"You mean," he said, light coming to him, "they will ask me whether I am a professor of religion, don't you?"

"Why, to be sure!"

"Oh!"

"And you better have your answer ready."

"What, in your judgment, may I ask, would be a suitable answer to that?"

"Well, ARE you a perfessor?"

"Oh, I'm anything at all that will get me this 'job.' I've got to have it as a makeshift until I can get hold of something better. Let me see—will a Baptist do?"

"Are you a Baptist?" the girl stolidly asked.

"When circumstances are pressing. Will they be satisfied with a Baptist?"

"That's one of the fashionable churches of the world," Amanda replied gravely. "And the directors is most all Mennonites and Amish and Dunkards. All them is PLAIN churches and loosed of the world, you know."

"Oh, well, I'll wriggle out somehow! Trust to luck!" Fairchilds dismissed the subject, realizing the injudiciousness of being too confidential with this girl on so short an acquaintance.

At the momentous hour of seven, the directors promptly assembled. When Tillie, at her aunt's request, carried two kerosene lamps into the parlor, a sudden determination came to the girl to remain and witness the reception of the new teacher by the School Board.

She was almost sick with apprehension lest the Board should realize, as she did, that this Harvard graduate was too fine for such as they. It was an austere Board, hard to satisfy, and there was nothing they would so quickly resent and reject as evident superiority in an applicant. The Normal School students, their usual candidates, were for the most part, though not always, what was called in the neighborhood "nice and common." The New Canaan Board was certainly not accustomed to sitting in judgment upon an applicant such as this Pestalozzi Fairchilds. (Tillie's religion forbade her to call him by the vain and worldly form of Mr.)

No one noticed the pale-faced girl as, after placing one lamp on the marble-topped table about which the directors sat and another on the mantelpiece, she moved quietly away to the farthest corner of the long, narrow parlor and seated herself back of the stove.

The applicant, too, when he came into the room, was too much taken up with what he realized to be the perils of his case to observe the little watcher in the corner, though he walked past her so close that his coat brushed her shoulder, sending along her nerves, like a faint electric shock, a sensation so novel and so exquisite that it made her suddenly close her eyes to steady her throbbing head.

There were present six members of the Board—two Amishmen, one Old Mennonite, one patriarchal-looking Dunkard, one New Mennonite, and one Evangelical, the difference in their religious creeds being attested by their various costumes and the various cuts of beard and hair. The Evangelical, the New Mennonite, and the Amishmen were farmers, the Dunkard kept the store and the post-office, and the Old Mennonite was the stage-driver. Jacob Getz was the Evangelical; and Nathaniel Puntz, Absalom's father, the New Mennonite.

The investigation of the applicant was opened up by the president of the Board, a long-haired Amishman, whose clothes were fastened by hooks and eyes instead of buttons and buttonholes, these latter being considered by his sect as a worldly vanity.

"What was your experience a'ready as a teacher?"

Fairchilds replied that he had never had any.

Tillie's heart sank as, from her post in the corner, she heard this answer. Would the members think for one moment of paying forty dollars a month to a teacher without experience? She was sure they had never before done so. They were shaking their heads gravely over it, she could see.

But the investigation proceeded.

"What was your Persuasion then?"

Tillie saw, in the teacher's hesitation, that he did not understand the question.

"My 'Persuasion'? Oh! I see. You mean my Church?"

"Yes, what's your conwictions?"

He considered a moment. Tillie hung breathlessly upon his answer. She knew how much depended upon it with this Board of "plain" people. Could he assure them that he was "a Bible Christian"? Otherwise, they would never elect him to the New Canaan school. He gave his reply, presently, in a tone suggesting his having at that moment recalled to memory just what his "Persuasion" was. "Let me see—yes—I'm a Truth-Seeker."

"What's that again?" inquired the president, with interest. "I have not heard yet of that Persuasion."

"A Truth-Seeker," he gravely explained, "is one who believes in—eh—in a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity."

The members looked at each other cautiously.

"Is that the English you're speakin', or whatever?" asked the Dunkard member. "Some of them words ain't familiar with me till now, and I don't know right what they mean."

"Yes, I'm talking English," nodded the applicant. "We also believe," he added, growing bolder, "in the fundamental, biogenetic law that ontogenesis is an abridged repetition of philogenesis."

"He says they believe in Genesis," remarked the Old Mennonite, appealing for aid, with bewildered eyes, to the other members.

"Maybe he's a Jew yet!" put in Nathaniel Puntz. "We also believe," Mr. Fairchilds continued, beginning to enjoy himself, "in the revelations of science."

"He believes in Genesis and in Revelations," explained the president to the others.

"Maybe he's a Cat'lic!" suggested the suspicious Mr. Puntz.

"No," said Fairchilds, "I am, as I said, a Truth-Seeker. A Truth-Seeker can no more be a Catholic or a Jew in faith than an Amishman can, or a Mennonite, or a Brennivinarian."

Tillie knew he was trying to say "Winebrennarian," the name of one of the many religious sects of the county, and she wondered at his not knowing better.

"You ain't a gradyate, neither, are you?" was the president's next question, the inscrutable mystery of the applicant's creed being for the moment dropped.

"Why, yes, I thought you knew that. Of Harvard."

"Och, that!" contemptuously; "I mean you ain't a gradyate of Millersville Normal?"

"No," humbly acknowledged Fairchilds.

"When I was young," Mr. Getz irrelevantly remarked, "we didn't have no gradyate teachers like what they have now, still. But we anyhow learnt more ACCORDING."

"How long does it take you to get 'em from a, b, c's to the Testament?" inquired the patriarchal Dunkard.

"That depends upon the capacity of the pupil," was Mr. Fairchilds's profound reply.

"Can you learn 'em 'rithmetic good?" asked Nathaniel Puntz. "I got a son his last teacher couldn't learn 'rithmetic to. He's wonderful dumm in 'rithmetic, that there boy is. Absalom by name. After the grandfather. His teacher tried every way to learn him to count and figger good. He even took and spread toothpicks out yet—but that didn't learn him neither. I just says, he ain't appointed to learn 'rithmetic. Then the teacher he tried him with such a Algebry. But Absalom he'd get so mixed up!—he couldn't keep them x's spotted."

"I have a method," Mr. Fairchilds began, "which I trust—"

To Tillie's distress, her aunt's voice, at this instant calling her to "come stir the sots [yeast] in," summoned her to the kitchen.

It was very hard to have to obey. She longed so to stay till Fairchilds should come safely through his fiery ordeal. For a moment she was tempted to ignore the summons, but her conscience, no less than her grateful affection for her aunt, made such behavior impossible. Softly she stole out of the room and noiselessly closed the door behind her.

A half-hour later, when her aunt and cousins had gone to bed, and while the august School Board still occupied the parlor, Tillie sat sewing in the sitting-room, while the doctor, at the other side of the table, nodded over his newspaper.

Since Tillie had come to live at the hotel, she and the doctor were often together in the evening; the Doc was fond of a chat over his pipe with the child whom he so helped and befriended in her secret struggles to educate herself. There was, of course, a strong bond of sympathy and friendship between them in their common conspiracy with Miss Margaret, whom the doctor had never ceased to hold in tender memory.

Just now Tillie's ears were strained to catch the sounds of the adjourning of the Board. When at last she heard their shuffling footsteps in the hall, her heart beat fast with suspense. A moment more and the door leading from the parlor opened and Fairchilds came out into the sitting-room.

Tillie did not lift her eyes from her sewing, but the room seemed suddenly filled with his presence.

"Well!" the doctor roused himself to greet the young man; "were you 'lected?"

Breathlessly, Tillie waited to hear his answer.

"Oh, yes; I've escaped alive!" Fairchilds leaned against the table in an attitude of utter relaxation. "They roasted me brown, though! Galileo at Rome, and Martin Luther at Worms, had a dead easy time compared to what I've been through!"

"I guess!" the doctor laughed. "Ain't!"

"I'm going to bed," the teacher announced in a tone of collapse. "Good night!"

"Good night!" answered the doctor, cordially.

Fairchilds drew himself up from the table and took a step toward the stairway; this brought him to Tillie's side of the table, and he paused a moment and looked down upon her as she sewed.

Her fingers trembled, and the pulse in her throat beat suffocatingly, but she did not look up.

"Good night, Miss—Tillie, isn't it?"

"Matilda Maria," Tillie's soft, shy voice replied as her eyes, full of light, were raised, for an instant, to the face above her.

The man smiled and bowed his acknowledgment; then, after an instant's hesitation, he said, "Pardon me: the uniform you and Mrs. Wackernagel wear—may I ask what it is?"

"'Uniform'?" breathed Tillie, wonderingly. "Oh, you mean the garb? We are members of meeting. The world calls us New Mennonites."

"And this is the uni—the garb of the New Mennonites?"

"Yes, sir."

"It is a very becoming garb, certainly," Fairchilds smiled, gazing down upon the fair young girl with a puzzled look in his own face, for he recognized, not only in her delicate features, and in the light of her beautiful eyes, but also in her speech, a something that set her apart from the rest of this household.

Tillie colored deeply at his words, and the doctor laughed outright.

"By gum! They wear the garb to make 'em look UNbecomin'! And he ups and tells her it's becomin' yet! That's a choke, Teacher! One on you, ain't? That there cap's to hide the hair which is a pride to the sek! And that cape over the bust is to hide woman's allurin' figger. See? And you ups and tells her it's a becomin' UNYFORM! Unyforms is what New Mennonites don't uphold to! Them's fur Cat'lics and 'Piscopals—and fur warriors—and the Mennonites don't favor war! Unyforms yet!" he laughed. "I'm swanged if that don't tickle me!"

"I stand corrected. I beg pardon if I've offended," Fairchilds said hastily. "Miss—Matilda—I hope I've not hurt your feelings? Believe me, I did not mean to."

"Och!" the doctor answered for her, "Tillie she ain't so easy hurt to her feelin's, are you, Tillie? Gosh, Teacher, them manners you got must keep you busy! Well, sometimes I think I'm better off if I stay common. Then I don't have to bother."

The door leading from the bar-room opened suddenly and Jacob Getz stood on the threshold.

"Well, Tillie," he said by way of greeting. "Uncle Abe sayed you wasn't went to bed yet, so I stopped to see you a minute."

"Well, father," Tillie answered as she put down her sewing and came up to him.

Awkwardly he bent to kiss her, and Tillie, even in her emotional excitement, realized, with a passing wonder, that he appeared glad to see her after a week of separation.

"It's been some lonesome, havin' you away," he told her.

"Is everybody well?" she asked.

"Yes, middlin'. You was sewin', was you?" he inquired, glancing at the work on the table.

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Don't waste your time. Next Saturday I 'll stop off after market on my way out from Lancaster and see you oncet, and get your wages off of Aunty Em."

"Yes, sir."

A vague idea of something unusual in the light of Tillie's eyes arrested him. He glanced suspiciously at the doctor, who was speaking in a low tone to the teacher.

"Look-ahere, Tillie. If Teacher there wants to keep comp'ny with one of yous girls, it ain't to be you, mind. He ain't to be makin' up to you! I don't want you to waste your time that there way."

Apprehensively, Tillie darted a sidelong glance at the teacher to see if he had heard—for though no tender sentiment was associated in her mind with the idea of "keeping company," yet intuitively she felt the unseemliness of her father's warning and its absurdity in the eyes of such as this stranger.

Mr. Fairchilds was leaning against the table, his arms folded, his lips compressed and his face flushed. She was sure that he had overheard her father. Was he angry, or—almost worse—did that compressed mouth mean concealed amusement?

"Well, now, I must be goin'," said Mr. Getz. "Be a good girl, mind. Och, I 'most forgot to tell you. Me and your mom's conceited we'd drive up to Puntz's Sunday afternoon after the dinner work's through a'ready. And if Aunty Em don't want you partic'lar, you're to come home and mind the childern, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Now, don't forget. Well, good-by, then."

Again he bent to kiss her, and Tillie felt Fairchilds's eyes upon her, as unresponsively she submitted to the caress.

"Good night to you, Teacher." Mr. Getz gruffly raised his voice to speak to the pair by the table. "And to you, Doc."

They answered him and he went away. When Tillie slowly turned back to the table, the teacher hastily took his leave and moved away to the stairway at the other end of the room. As she took up her sewing, she heard him mount the steps and presently close and lock the door of his room at the head of the stairs.

"He was, now, wonderful surprised, Tillie," the doctor confided to her, "when I tole him Jake Getz was your pop. He don't think your pop takes after you any. I says to him, 'Tillie's pop, there, bein' one of your bosses, you better make up to Tillie,' I says, and he sayed, 'You don't mean to tell me that that Mr. Getz of the School Board is the father of this girl?' 'That's what,' I says. 'He's that much her father,' I says, 'that you'd better keep on the right side of him by makin' up to Tillie,' I says, just to plague him. And just then your pop up and sayed if Teacher wanted to keep comp'ny he must pick out 'Manda or Rebecca—and I seen Teacher wanted to laugh, but his manners wouldn't leave him. He certainly has, now, a lot of manners, ain't, Tillie?"

Tillie's head was bent over her sewing and she did not answer.

The doctor yawned, stretched himself, and guessed he would step into the bar-room.

Tillie bent over her sewing for a long time after she was left alone. The music of the young man's grave voice as he had spoken her name and called her "Miss Matilda" sang in her brain. The fascination of his smile as he had looked down into her eyes, and the charm of his chivalrous courtesy, so novel to her experience, haunted and intoxicated her. And tonight, Tillie felt her soul flooded with a life and light so new and strange that she trembled as before a miracle.

Meanwhile, Walter Fairchilds, alone in his room, his mind too full of the events and characters to which the past day had introduced him to admit of sleep, was picturing, with mingled amusement and regret, the genuine horror of his fastidious relatives could they know of his present environment, among people for whom their vocabulary had but one word—a word which would have consigned them all, even that sweet-voiced, clear-eyed little Puritan, Matilda Maria, to outer darkness; and that he, their adopted son and brother, should be breaking bread and living on a footing of perfect equality with these villagers he knew would have been, in their eyes, an offense only second in heinousness to that of his apostasy.



XVI

THE WACKERNAGELS "CONWERSE"

The next day, being the Sabbath, brought to Tillie two of the keenest temptations she had ever known. In the first place, she did not want to obey her father and go home after dinner to take care of the children. All in a day the hotel had become to her the one haven where she would be, outside of which the sun did not shine.

True, by going home she might hope to escape the objectionable Sunday evening sitting-up with Absalom; for in spite of the note she had sent him, telling him of her father's wish that he must not come to see her at the hotel, she was unhappily sure that he would appear as usual. Indeed, with his characteristic dogged persistency, he was pretty certain to follow her, whithersoever she went. And even if he did not, it would be easier to endure the slow torture of his endless visit under this roof, which sheltered also that other presence, than to lose one hour away from its wonderful and mysterious charm.

"Now, look here, Tillie," said Aunty Em, at the breakfast-table, "you worked hard this week, and this after you're restin'—leastways, unless you WANT to go home and take care of all them litter of childern. If you don't want to go, you just stay—and I'll take the blame! I'll say I needed you."

"Let Jake Getz come 'round HERE tryin' to bully you, Tillie," exclaimed Mr. Wackernagel, "and it won't take me a week to tell him what I think of HIM! I don't owe HIM nothin'!"

"No," agreed Jake Getz's sister, "we don't live off of him!"

"And I don't care who fetches him neither!" added Mr. Wackernagel—which expression of contempt was one of the most scathing known to the tongue of a Pennsylvania Dutchman.

"What are you goin' to do, Tillie?" Amanda asked. "Are you goin' or stayin'?"

Tillie wavered a moment between duty and inclination; between the habit of servility to her father and the magic power that held her in its fascinating spell here under her uncle's roof.

"I'm staying," she faltered.

"Good fur you, Tillie!" laughed her uncle. "You're gettin' learnt here to take your own head a little fur things. Well, I'd like to get you spoilt good fur your pop—that's what I'd like to do!"

"We darsent go too fur," warned Aunty Em, "or he won't leave her stay with us at all."

"Now there's you, Abe," remarked the doctor, dryly; "from the time your childern could walk and talk a'ready all you had to say was 'Go'—and they stayed. Ain't?"

Mr. Wackernagel joined in the loud laughter of his wife and daughters.

Tillie realized that the teacher, as he sipped his coffee, was listening to the dialogue with astonishment and curiosity, and she hungered to know all that was passing through his mind.

Her second temptation came to her upon hearing Fairchilds, as they rose from the breakfast-table, suggest a walk in the woods with Amanda and Rebecca. "And won't Miss Tillie go too?" he inquired.

Her aunt answered for her. "Och, she wouldn't have dare, her bein' a member, you know. It would be breakin' the Sabbath. And anyways, even if it wasn't Sunday, us New Mennonites don't take walks or do anything just fur pleasure when they ain't nothin' useful in it. If Tillie went, I'd have to report her to the meetin', even if it did go ag'in' me to do it."

"And then what would happen?" Mr. Fairchilds inquired curiously.

"She'd be set back."

"'Set back'?"

"She wouldn't have dare to greet the sisters with a kiss, and she couldn't speak with me or eat with me or any of the brothers and sisters till she gave herself up ag'in and obeyed to the rules."

"This is very interesting," commented Fairchilds, his contemplative gaze moving from the face of Mrs. Wackernagel to Tillie. "But," he questioned, "Mrs. Wackernagel, why are your daughters allowed to do what you think wrong and would not do?"

"Well," began Aunty Em, entering with relish into the discussion, for she was strong in theology, "we don't hold to forcin' our childern or interferin' with the free work of the Holy Spirit in bringin' souls to the truth. We don't do like them fashionable churches of the world where teaches their childern to say their prayers and makes 'em read the Bible and go to Sunday-school. We don't uphold to Sunday-schools. You can't read nothin' in the Scripture about Sunday-schools. We hold everybody must come by their free will, and learnt only of the Holy Spirit, into the light of the One True Way."

Fairchilds gravely thanked her for her explanation and pursued the subject no further.

When Tillie presently saw him start out with her cousins, an unregenerate longing filled her soul to stay away from meeting and go with them, to spend this holy Sabbath day in worshiping, not her God, but this most god-like being who had come like the opening up of heaven into her simple, uneventful life. In her struggle with her conscience to crush such sinful desires, Tillie felt that now, for the first time, she understood how Jacob of old had wrestled with the Angel.

Her spiritual struggle was not ended by her going dutifully to meeting with her aunt. During all the long services of the morning she fought with her wandering attention to keep it upon the sacred words that were spoken and sung. But her thoughts would not be controlled. Straying like a wicked imp into forbidden paths, her fancy followed the envied ones into the soft, cool shadows of the autumn woods and along the banks of the beautiful Conestoga, and mingling with the gentle murmuring of the leaves and the rippling of the water, she heard that resonant voice, so unlike any voice she had ever heard before, and that little abrupt laugh with its odd falsetto note, which haunted her like a strain of music; and she saw, in the sunlight of the lovely October morning, against a background of gold and brown leaves and silver water, the finely chiseled face, the thoughtful, pale forehead, the kind eyes, the capable white hands, of this most wonderful young man.

Tillie well understood that could the brethren and sisters know in what a worldly frame of mind she sat in the house of God this day, undoubtedly they would present her case for "discipline," and even, perhaps, "set her back." But all the while that she tried to fight back the enemy of her soul, who thus subtly beset her with temptation to sin, she felt the utter uselessness of her struggle with herself. For even when she did succeed in forcing her attention upon some of the hymns, it was in whimsical and persistent terms of the teacher that she considered them. How was it possible, she wondered, for him, or any unconverted soul, to hear, without being moved to "give himself up," such lines as these:

"He washed them all to make them clean, But Judas still was full of sin. May none of us, like Judas, sell Our Lord for gold, and go to hell!"

And these:

"O man, remember, thou must die; The sentence is for you and I. Where shall we be, or will we go, When we must leave this world below?"

In the same moment that Tillie was wondering how a "Truth-Seeker" would feel under these searching words, she felt herself condemned by them for her wandering attention.

The young girl's feelings toward the stranger at this present stage of their evolution were not, like those of Amanda and Rebecca, the mere instinctive feminine craving for masculine admiration. She did not think of herself in relation to him at all. A great hunger possessed her to know him—all his thoughts, his emotions, the depths and the heights of him; she did not long, or even wish, that he might know and admire HER.

The three-mile drive home from church seemed to Tillie, sitting in the high, old-fashioned buggy at her aunt's side, an endless journey. Never had old Dolly traveled so deliberately or with more frequent dead stops in the road to meditate upon her long-past youth. Mrs. Wackernagel's ineffectual slaps of the reins upon the back of the decrepit animal inspired in Tillie an inhuman longing to seize the whip and lash the feeble beast into a swift pace. The girl felt appalled at her own feelings, so novel and inexplicable they seemed to her. Whether there was more of ecstasy or torture in them, she hardly knew.

Immediately after dinner the teacher went out and did not turn up again until evening, when he retired immediately to the seclusion of his own room.

The mystification of the family at this unaccountably unsocial behavior, their curiosity as to where he had been, their suspense as to what he did when alone so long in his bedroom, reached a tension that was painful.

Promptly at half-past six, Absalom, clad in his Sunday suit, appeared at the hotel, to perform his weekly stint of sitting-up.

As Rebecca always occupied the parlor on Sunday evening with her gentleman friend, there was only left to Absalom and Tillie to sit either in the kitchen or with the assembled family in the sitting-room. Tillie preferred the latter. Of course she knew that such respite as the presence of the family gave her was only temporary, for in friendly consideration of what were supposed to be her feelings in the matter, they would all retire early. Absalom also knowing this, accepted the brief inconvenience of their presence without any marked restiveness.

"Say, Absalom," inquired the doctor, as the young man took up his post on the settee beside Tillie, sitting as close to her as he could without pushing her off, "how did your pop pass his opinion about the new teacher after the Board meeting Saturday, heh?"

The doctor was lounging in his own special chair by the table, his fat legs crossed and his thumbs thrust into his vest arms. Amanda idly rocked back and forth in a large luridly painted rocking-chair by the window, and Mrs. Wackernagel sat by the table before an open Bible in which she was not too much absorbed to join occasionally in the general conversation.

"He sayed he was afraid he was some tony," answered Absalom. "And," he added, a reflection in his tone of his father's suspicious attitude on Saturday night toward Fairchilds, "pop sayed HE couldn't make out what was his conwictions. He couldn't even tell right was he a Bible Christian or no."

"He certainly does, now, have pecooliar views," agreed the doctor. "I was talkin' to him this after—"

"You WAS!" exclaimed Amanda, a note of chagrin in her voice. "Well, I'd like to know where at? Where had he took himself to?"

"Up to the woods there by the old mill. I come on him there at five o'clock—layin' readin' and musin'—when I was takin' a short cut home through the woods comin' from Adam Oberholzer's."

"Well I never!" cried Amanda. "And was he out there all by hisself the whole afternoon?" she asked incredulously.

"So much as I know. AIN'T he, now, a queer feller not to want a girl along when one was so handy?" teased the doctor.

"Well," retorted Amanda, "I think he's hard up—to be spendin' a whole afternoon READIN'!"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie leaned forward and whispered, "he's up in his room and perhaps he can hear us through the register!"

"I wisht he KIN," declared Amanda, "if it would learn him how dumm us folks thinks a feller where spends a whole Sunday afternoon by hisself READIN'!"

"Why, yes," put in Mrs. Wackernagel; "what would a body be wantin' to waste time like that fur?—when he could of spent his nice afternoon settin' there on the porch with us all, conwersin'."

"And he's at it ag'in this evenin', up there in his room," the doctor informed them. "I went up to give him my lamp, and I'm swanged if he ain't got a many books and such pamp'lets in his room! As many as ten, I guess! I tole him: I says, 'It does, now, beat all the way you take to them books and pamp'lets and things!'"

"It's a pity of him!" said motherly Mrs. Wackernagel.

"And I says to him," added the doctor, "I says, 'You ain't much fur sociability, are you?' I says."

"Well, I did think, too, Amanda," sympathized her mother, "he'd set up with you mebbe to-night, seein' Rebecca and Tillie's each got their gent'man comp'ny—even if he didn't mean it fur really, but only to pass the time."

"Och, he needn't think I'm dyin' to set up with HIM! There's a plenty others would be glad to set up with me, if I was one of them that was fur keepin' comp'ny with just ANYbody! But I did think when I heard he was goin' to stop here that mebbe he'd be a JOLLY feller that way. Well," Amanda concluded scathingly, "I'm goin' to tell Lizzie Hershey she ain't missin' much!"

"What's them pecooliar views of hisn you was goin' to speak to us, Doc?" said Absalom.

"Och, yes, I was goin' to tell you them. Well, here this after we got to talkin' about the subjeck of prayer, and I ast him his opinion. And if I understood right what he meant, why, prayin' is no different to him than musin'. Leastways, that's the thought I got out of his words."

"Musin'," repeated Absalom. "What's musin'?"

"Yes, what's that ag'in?" asked Mrs. Wackernagel, alert with curiosity, theological discussions being always of deep interest to her.

"Musin' is settin' by yourself and thinkin' of your learnin'," explained the doctor. "I've took notice, this long time back, educated persons they like to set by theirselves, still, and muse."

"And do you say," demanded Absalom, indignantly, "that Teacher he says it's the same to him as prayin'—this here musin'?"

"So much as I know, that's what he sayed."

"Well," declared Absalom, "that there ain't in the Bible! He'd better watch out! If he ain't a Bible Christian, pop and Jake Getz and the other directors'll soon put him off William Penn!"

"Och, Absalom, go sass your gran'mom!" was the doctor's elegant retort. "What's ailin' YOU, anyways, that you want to be so spunky about Teacher? I guess you're mebbe thinkin' he'll cut you out with Tillie, ain't?"

"I'd like to see him try it oncet!" growled Absalom.

Tillie grew cold with fear that the teacher might hear them; but she knew there was no use in protesting.

"Are you goin' to keep on at William Penn all winter, Absalom?" Mrs. Wackernagel asked.

"Just long enough to see if he kin learn 'rithmetic to me. Ezra Herr, he was too dumm to learn me."

"Mebbe," said the doctor, astutely, "you was too dumm to GET learnt!"

"I AM wonderful dumm in 'rithmetic," Absalom acknowledged shamelessly. "But pop says this here teacher is smart and kin mebbe learn me. I've not saw him yet myself."

Much as Tillie disliked being alone with her suitor, she was rather relieved this evening when the family, en masse, significantly took its departure to the second floor; for she hoped that with no one but Absalom to deal with, she could induce him to lower his voice so their talk would not be audible to the teacher in the room above.

Had she been able but faintly to guess what was to ensue on her being left alone with him, she would have fled up-stairs with the rest of the family and left Absalom to keep company with the chairs.



XVII

THE TEACHER MEETS ABSALOM

Only a short time had the sitting-room been abandoned to them when Tillie was forced to put a check upon her lover's ardor.

"Now, Absalom," she firmly said, moving away from his encircling arm, "unless you leave me be, I'm not sitting on the settee alongside you at all. You MUST NOT kiss me or hold my hand—or even touch me. Never again. I told you so last Sunday night."

"But why?" Absalom asked, genuinely puzzled. "Is it that I kreistle you, Tillie?"

"N—no," she hesitated. An affirmative reply, she knew, would be regarded as a cold-blooded insult. In fact, Tillie herself did not understand her own repugnance to Absalom's caresses.

"You act like as if I made you feel repulsive to me, Tillie," he complained.

"N—no. I don't want to be touched. That's all."

"Well, I'd like to know what fun you think there is in settin' up with a girl that won't leave a feller kiss her or hug her!"

"I'm sure I don't know what you do see in it, Absalom. I told you not to come."

"If I ain't to hold your hand or kiss yon, what are we to do to pass the time?" he reasoned.

"I'll tell you, Absalom. Let me read to you. Then we wouldn't be wasting the evening."

"I ain't much fur readin'. I ain't like Teacher." He frowned and looked at her darkly. "I've took notice how much fur books you are that way. Last Sunday night, too, you sayed, 'Let me read somepin to you.' Mebbe you and Teacher will be settin' up readin' together. And mebbe the Doc wasn't just jokin' when he sayed Teacher might cut me out!"

"Please, Absalom," Tillie implored him, "don't talk so loud!"

"I don't care! I hope he hears me sayin' that if he ever comes tryin' to get my girl off me, I 'll get pop to have him put off his job!"

"None of you know what you are talking about," Tillie indignantly whispered. "You can't understand. The teacher is a man that wouldn't any more keep company with one of us country girls than you would keep company, Absalom, with a gipsy. He's ABOVE us!"

"Well, I guess if you're good enough fur me, Tillie Getz, you're good enough fur anybody else—leastways fur a man that gets his job off the wotes of your pop and mine!"

"The teacher is a—a gentleman, Absalom."

Absalom did not understand. "Well, I guess I know he ain't a lady. I guess I know what his sek is!"

Tillie sighed in despair, and sank back on the settee. For a few minutes they sat in strained silence.

"I never seen a girl like what you are! You're wonderful different to the other girls I've knew a'ready."

Tillie did not reply.

"Where d'you come by them books you read?"

"The Doc gets them for me."

"Well, Tillie, look-ahere. I spoke somepin to the Doc how I wanted to fetch you somepin along when I come over sometime, and I ast him what, now, he thought you would mebbe like. And he sayed a book. So I got Cousin Sally Puntz to fetch one along fur me from the Methodist Sunday-school li-bry, and here I brung it over to you."

He produced a small volume from his coat pocket.

"I was 'most ashamed to bring it, it's so wonderful little. I tole Cousin Sally, 'Why didn't you bring me a bigger book?' And she sayed she did try to get a bigger one, but they was all. There's one in that li-bry with four hunderd pages. I tole her, now, she's to try to get me that there one next Sunday before it's took by somebody. This one's 'most too little."

Tillie smiled as she took it from him. "Thank you, Absalom. I don't care if it's LITTLE, so long as it's interesting—and instructive," she spoke primly.

"The Bible's such a big book, I thought the bigger the book was, the nearer it was like the Bible," said Absalom.

"But there's the dictionary, Absalom. It's as big as the Bible."

"Don't the size make nothin'?" Absalom asked.

Tillie shook her head, still smiling. She glanced down and read aloud the title of the book she held: "'What a Young Husband Ought to Know.'"

"But, Absalom!" she faltered.

"Well? What?"

She looked up into his heavy, blank face, and suddenly a faint sense of humor seemed born in her—and she laughed.

The laugh illumined her face, and it was too much for Absalom. He seized her and kissed her, with resounding emphasis, squarely on the mouth.

Instantly Tillie wrenched herself away from him and stood up. Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled. And yet, she was not indignant with him in the sense that a less unsophisticated girl would have been. Absalom, according to New Canaan standards, was not exceeding his rights under the circumstances. But an instinct, subtle, undefined, incomprehensible to herself, contradicted, indeed, by every convention of the neighborhood in which she had been reared, made Tillie feel that in yielding her lips to this man for whom she did not care, and whom, if she could hold out against him, she did not intend to marry, she was desecrating her womanhood. Vague and obscure as her feeling was, it was strong enough to control her.

"I meant what I said, Absalom. If you won't leave me be, I won't stay here with you. You'll have to go home, for now I'm going right up-stairs."

She spoke with a firmness that made the dull youth suddenly realize a thing of which he had never dreamed, that however slightly Tillie resembled her father in other respects, she did have a bit of his determination.

She took a step toward the stairs, but Absalom seized her skirts and pulled her back. "You needn't think I'm leavin' you act like that to me, Tillie!" he muttered, his ardor whetted by the difficulties of his courting. "Now I'll learn you!" and holding her slight form in his burly grasp he kissed her again and again.

"Leave me go!" she cried. "I'll call out if you don't! Stop it, Absalom!"

Absalom laughed aloud, his eyes glittering as he felt her womanly helplessness in his strong clasp.

"What you goin' to do about it, Tillie? You can't help yourself—you got to get kissed if you want to or no!" And again his articulate caresses sounded upon her shrinking lips, and he roared with laughter in his own satisfaction and in his enjoyment of her predicament. "You can't help yourself," he said, crushing her against him in a bearish hug.

"Absalom!" the girl's voice rang out sharply in pain and fear.

Then of a sudden Absalom's wrists were seized in a strong grip, and the young giant found his arms pinned behind him.

"Now, then, Absalom, you let this little girl alone. Do you understand?" said Fairchilds, coolly, as he let go his hold on the youth and stepped round to his side.

Absalom's face turned white with fury as he realized who had dared to interfere. He opened his lips, but speech would not come to him. Clenching his fingers, he drew back his arm, but his heavy fist, coming swiftly forward, was caught easily in Fairchilds's palm—and held there.

"Come, come," he said soothingly, "it isn't worth while to row, you know. And in the presence of the lady!"

"You mind to your OWN business!" spluttered Absalom, struggling to free his hand, and, to his own surprise, failing. Quickly he drew back his left fist and again tried to strike, only to find it too caught and held, with no apparent effort on the part of the teacher. Tillie, at first pale with fright at what had promised to be so unequal a contest in view of the teacher's slight frame and the brawny, muscular strength of Absalom, felt her pulses bound with a thrill of admiration for this cool, quiet force which could render the other's fury so helpless; while at the same time she felt sick with shame.

"Blame you!" cried Absalom, wildly. "Le' me be! It don't make nothin' to you if I kiss my girl! I don't owe YOU nothin'! You le' me be!"

"Certainly," returned Fairchilds, cheerfully. "Just stop annoying Miss Tillie, that's all I want."'

He dropped the fellow's hands and deliberately drew out his handkerchief to wipe his own.

A third time Absalom made a furious dash at him, to find his two wrists caught in the vise-like grip of his antagonist.

"Tut, tut, Absalom, this is quite enough. Behave yourself, or I shall be obliged to hurt you."

"YOU—you white-faced, woman-faced mackerel! YOU think you kin hurt me! You—"

"Now then," Fairchilds again dropped Absalom's hands and picked up from the settee the book which the youth had presented to Tillie. "Here, Absalom, take your 'What a Young Husband Ought to Know' and go home."

Something in the teacher's quiet, confident tone cowed Absalom completely—for the time being, at least. He was conquered. It was very bewildering. The man before him was not half his weight and was not in the least ruffled. How had he so easily "licked" him? Absalom, by reason of his stalwart physique and the fact that his father was a director, had, during most of his school life, found pleasing diversion in keeping the various teachers of William Penn cowed before him. He now saw his supremacy in that quarter at an end—physically speaking at least. There might be a moral point of attack.

"Look-ahere!" he blustered. "Do you know my pop's Nathaniel Puntz, the director?"

"You are a credit to him, Absalom. By the way, will you take a message to him from me? Tell him, please, that the lock on the school-room door is broken, and I'd be greatly obliged if he would send up a lock-smith to mend it."

Absalom looked discouraged. A Harvard graduate was, manifestly, a freak of nature—invulnerable at all points.

"If pop gets down on you, you won't be long at William Penn!" he bullied. "You'll soon get chased off your job!"

"My job at breaking you in? Well, well, I might be spending my time more profitably, that's so."

"You go on out of here and le' me alone with my girl!" quavered Absalom, blinking away tears of rage.

"That will be as she says. How is it, Miss Tillie? Do you want him to go?"

Now Tillie knew that if she allowed Absalom Puntz to leave her in his present state of baffled anger, Fairchilds would not remain in New Canaan a month. Absalom was his father's only child, and Nathaniel Puntz was known to be both suspicious and vindictive. "Clothed in a little brief authority," as school director, he never missed an opportunity to wield his precious power.

With quick insight, Tillie realized that the teacher would think meanly of her if, after her outcry at Absalom's amorous behavior, she now inconsistently ask that he remain with her for the rest of the evening. But what the teacher might think about HER did not matter so much as that he should be saved from the wrath of Absalom.

"Please leave him stay," she answered in a low voice.

Fairchilds gazed in surprise upon the girl's sweet, troubled face. "Let him stay?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps my interference was unwelcome?"

"I thank you, but—I want him to stay."

"Yes? I beg pardon for my intrusion. Good night."

He turned away somewhat abruptly and left the room.

And Tillie was again alone with Absalom.

IN his chamber, getting ready for bed, Fairchilds's thoughts idly dwelt upon the strange contradictions he seemed to see in the character of the little Mennonite maiden. He had thought that he recognized in her a difference from the rest of this household—a difference in speech, in feature, in countenance, in her whole personality. And yet she could allow the amorous attentions of that coarse, stupid cub; and her protestations against the fellow's liberties with her had been mere coquetry. Well, he would be careful, another time, how he played the part of a Don Quixote.

Meantime Tillie, with suddenly developed histrionic skill, was, by a Spartan self-sacrifice in submitting to Absalom's love-making, overcoming his wrath against the teacher. Absalom never suspected how he was being played upon, or what a mere tool he was in the hands of this gentle little girl, when, somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself half promising that the teacher should not be complained of to his father. The infinite tact and scheming it required on Tillie's part to elicit this assurance without further arousing his jealousy left her, at the end of his prolonged sitting-up, utterly exhausted.

Yet when at last her weary head found her pillow, it was not to rest or sleep. A haunting, fearful certainty possessed her. "Dumm" as he was, Absalom, in his invulnerable persistency, had become to the tired, tortured girl simply an irresistible force of Nature. And Tillie felt that, struggle as she might against him, there would come a day when she could fight no longer, and so at last she must fall a victim to this incarnation of Dutch determination.



XVIII

TILLIE REVEALS HERSELF

In the next few days, Tillie tried in vain to summon courage to appeal to the teacher for assistance in her winter's study. Day after day she resolved to speak to him, and as often postponed it, unable to conquer her shyness. Meantime, however, under the stimulus of his constant presence, she applied herself in every spare moment to the school-books used by her two cousins, and in this unaided work she succeeded, as usual, in making headway.

Fairchilds's attention was arrested by the frequent picture of the little Mennonite maiden conning school-books by lamp-light.

One evening he happened to be alone with her for a few minutes in the sitting-room. It was Hallowe'en, and he was waiting for Amanda to come down from her room, where she was arraying herself for conquest at a party in the village, to which he had been invited to escort her.

"Studying all alone?" he inquired sociably, coming to the table where Tillie sat, and looking down upon her.

"Yes," said Tillie, raising her eyes for an instant.

"May I see!"

He bent to look at her book, pressing it open with his palm, and the movement brought his hand in contact with hers. Tillie felt for an instant as if she were going to swoon, so strangely delicious was the shock.

"'Hiawatha,'" he said, all unconscious of the tempest in the little soul apparently so close to him, yet in reality so immeasurably far away. "Do you enjoy it?" he inquired curiously.

"Oh, yes"; then quickly she added, "I am parsing it."

"Oh!" There was a faint disappointment in his tone.

"But," she confessed, "I read it all through the first day I began to parse it, and—and I wish I was parsing something else, because I keep reading this instead of parsing it, and—"

"You enjoy the story and the poetry?" he questioned.

"But a body mustn't read just for pleasure," she said timidly; "but for instruction; and this 'Hiawatha' is a temptation to me."

"What makes you think you ought not to read 'just for pleasure'?"

"That would be a vanity. And we Mennonites are loosed from the things of the world."

"Do you never do anything just for the pleasure of it?"

"When pleasure and duty go hand in hand, then pleasure is not displeasing to God. But Christ, you know, did not go about seeking pleasure. And we try to follow him in all things."

"But, child, has not God made the world beautiful for our pleasure? Has he not given us appetites and passions for our pleasure?—minds and hearts and bodies constructed for pleasure?"

"Has he made anything for pleasure apart from usefulness?" Tillie asked earnestly, suddenly forgetting her shyness.

"But when a thing gives pleasure it is serving the highest possible use," he insisted. "It is blasphemous to close your nature to the pleasures God has created for you. Blasphemous!"

"Those thoughts have come to me still," said Tillie. "But I know they were sent to me by the Enemy."

"'The Enemy'?"

"The Enemy of our souls."

"Oh!" he nodded; then abruptly added, "Now do you know, little girl, I wouldn't let HIM bother me at this stage of the game, if I were you! He's a back number, really!" He checked himself, remembering how dangerous such heresies were in New Canaan. "Don't you find it dull working alone?" he asked hastily, "and rather uphill?"

"It is often very hard."

"Often? Then you have been doing it for some time?"

"Yes," Tillie answered hesitatingly. No one except the doctor shared her secret with Miss Margaret. Self-concealment had come to be the habit of her life—her instinct for self-preservation. And yet, the teacher's evident interest, his presence so close to her, brought all her soul to her lips. She had a feeling that if she could overcome her shyness, she would be able to speak to him as unrestrainedly, as truly, as she talked in her letters to Miss Margaret.

"Do you have no help at all?" he pursued.

Could she trust him with the secret of Miss Margaret's letters? The habit of secretiveness was too strong upon her. "There is no one here to help me—unless YOU would sometimes," she timidly answered.

"I am at your service always. Nothing could give me greater pleasure."

"Thank you." Her face flushed with delight.

"You have, of course, been a pupil at William Penn?" he asked.

"Yes, but father took me out of school when I was twelve. Ever since then I've been trying to educate myself, but—" she lifted troubled eyes to his face, "no one here knows it but the doctor. No one must know it."

"Trust me," he nodded. "But why must they not know it?"

"Father would stop it if he found it out."

"Why?"

"He wouldn't leave me waste the time."

"You have had courage—to have struggled against such odds."

"It has not been easy. But—it seems to me the things that are worth having are never easy to get."

Fairchilds looked at her keenly.

"'The things that are worth having'? What do you count as such things?"

"Knowledge and truth; and personal freedom to be true to one's self."

He concealed the shock of surprise he felt at her words. "What have we here?" he wondered, his pulse quickening as he looked into the shining upraised eyes of the girl and saw the tumultuous heaving of her bosom. He had been right after all, then, in feeling that she was different from the rest of them! He could see that it was under the stress of unusual emotion that she gave expression to thoughts which of necessity she must seldom or never utter to those about her.

"'Personal freedom to be true to one's self'?" he repeated. "What would it mean to you if you had it?"

"Life!" she answered. "I am only a dead machine, except when I am living out my true self."

He deliberately placed his hand on hers as it lay on the table. "You make me want to clasp hands with you. Do you realize what a big truth you have gotten hold of—and all that it involves?"

"I only know what it means to me."

"You are not free to be yourself?"

"I have never drawn a natural breath except in secret."

Tillie's face was glowing. Scarcely did she know herself in this wonderful experience of speaking freely, face to face, with one who understood.

"My own recent experiences of life," he said gravely, "have brought me, too, to realize that it is death in life not to be true to one's self. But if you wait for the FREEDOM to be so—" he shrugged his shoulders. "One always has that freedom if he will take it—at its fearful cost. To be uncompromisingly and always true to one's self simply means martyrdom in one form or another."

He, too, marveled that he should have found any one in this household to whom he could speak in such a vein as this.

"I always thought," Tillie said, "that when I was enough educated to be a teacher and be independent of father, I would be free to live truly. But I see that YOU cannot. You, too, have to hide your real self. Else you could not stay here in New Canaan."

"Or anywhere else, child," he smiled. "It is only with the rare few whom one finds on one's own line of march that one can be absolutely one's self. Your secret life, Miss Tillie, is not unique."

A fascinating little brown curl had escaped from Tillie's cap and lay on her cheek, and she raised her hand to push it back where it belonged, under its snowy Mennonite covering.

"Don't!" said Fairchilds. "Let it be. It's pretty!"

Tillie stared up at him, a new wonder in her eyes.

"In that Mennonite cap, you look like—like a Madonna!" Almost unwittingly the words had leaped from his lips; he could not hold them back. And in uttering them, it came to him that in the freedom permissible to him with an unsophisticated but interesting and gifted girl like this—freedom from the conventional restraints which had always limited his intercourse with the girls of his own social world—there might be possible a friendship such as he had never known except with those of his own sex—and with them but rarely. The thought cheered him mightily; for his life in New Canaan was heavy with loneliness.

With the selfishness natural to man, he did not stop to consider what such companionship might come to mean to this inexperienced girl steeped in a life of sordid labor and unbroken monotony.

There came the rustle of Amanda's skirts on the stairs.

Fairchilds clasped Tillie's passive hand. "I feel that I have found a friend to-night."

Amanda, brilliant in a scarlet frock and pink ribbons, appeared in the doorway. The vague, almost unseeing look with which the teacher turned to her was interpreted by the vanity of this buxom damsel to be the dazzled vision of eyes half blinded by her radiance.

For a long time after they had gone away together, Tillie sat with her face bowed upon her book, happiness surging through her with every great throb of her heart.

At last she rose, picked up the lamp and carried it into the kitchen to the little mirror before which the family combed their hair. Holding the lamp high, she surveyed her features. As long as her arm would bear the weight of the uplifted lamp, she gazed at her reflected image.

When presently with trembling arm she set it on the dresser, Tillie, like Mother Eve of old, had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Tillie knew that she was very fair.

That evening marked another crisis in the girl's inner life. Far into the night she lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, seeing there strange new visions of her own soul, gazing into its hitherto unsounded depths and seeing there the heaven or the hell—she scarcely knew which—that possessed all her being.

"Blasphemous to close your nature to the pleasures God has created for you!" His words burned themselves into her brain. Was it to an abyss of degradation that her nature was bearing her in a swift and fatal tide—or to a holy height of blessedness? Alternately her fired imagination and awakened passion exalted her adoration of him into an almost religious joy, making her yearn to give herself to him, soul and body, as to a god; then plunged her into an agony of remorse and terror at her own idolatry and lawlessness.

A new universe was opened up to her, and all of life appeared changed. All the poetry and the stories which she had ever read held new and wonderful meanings. The beauty in Nature, which, even as a child, she had felt in a way she knew those about her could never have understood, now spoke to her in a language of infinite significance. The mystery, the wonder, the power of love were revealed to her, and her soul was athirst to drink deep at this magic fountain of living water.

"You look like a Madonna!" Oh, surely, thought Tillie, in the long hours of that wakeful night, this bliss which filled her heart WAS a temptation of the Evil One, who did not scruple to use even such as the teacher for an instrument to work her undoing! Was not his satanic hand clearly shown in these vain and wicked thoughts which crowded upon her—thoughts of how fair she would look in a red gown like Amanda's, or in a blue hat like Rebecca's, instead of in her white cap and black hood? She crushed her face in her pillow in an agony of remorse for her own faithlessness, as she felt how hideous was that black Mennonite hood and all the plain garb which hitherto had stood to her for the peace, the comfort, the happiness, of her life! With all her mind, she tried to force back such wayward, sinful thoughts, but the more she wrestled with them, the more persistently did they obtrude themselves.

On her knees she passionately prayed to be delivered from the temptation of such unfaithfulness to her Lord, even in secret thought. Yet even while in the very act of pleading for mercy, forgiveness, help, to her own unutterable horror she found herself wondering whether she would dare brave her father's wrath and ask her aunt, in the morning, to keep back from her father a portion of her week's wages that she might buy some new white caps, her old ones being of poor material and very worn.

It was a tenet of her church that "wearing-apparel was instituted by God as a necessity for the sake of propriety and also for healthful warmth, but when used for purposes of adornment it becomes the evidence of an un-Christlike spirit." Now Tillie knew that her present yearning for new caps was prompted, not by the praiseworthy and simple desire to be merely neat, but wholly by her vain longing to appear more fair in the eyes of the teacher.