r,
mounted the steps, and looked in.

She had by chance come to the girls' entrance. The scholars' backs
were toward her and Janice could look her fill without being observed.

There was a small class reciting before the teacher's desk--droning
away in a sleepy fashion. The older scholars, sitting in the rear of
the room, were mainly busy about their own private affairs; few seemed
to be conning their lessons.

Several girls were busily braiding the plaits of the girls in front of
them. Two, with very red faces and sparkling eyes, were undeniably
quarreling, and whispering bitter denunciations of each other, to the
amusement of their immediate neighbors. One girl had a bag of candy
which she was circulating among her particular friends. Another had
raised the covers of her geography like a screen, and was busily
engaged in writing a letter behind it, on robin's-egg-blue paper.

At the far end of the room the teacher, Miss Scattergood, sat at her
flat-topped desk. "That old maid," as Marty had called her, was not at
all the sort of a person--in appearance, at least--that Janice expected
her to be. Somehow, a spinster lady who had taught school--and such a
school as Poketown's--for twenty years, should have fitted the
well-known specifications of the old-time "New England schoolmarm."
But Amarilla Scattergood did not.

She was a little, light-haired, pink-cheeked lady, with more than a few
claims to personal attractiveness yet left. She had her mother's
birdlike tilt to her head when she spoke, her eyes were still bright,
and her complexion good.

These facts were visible to Janice even from the doorway.

When she knocked lightly upon the door-frame, Miss Scattergood looked
up and saw her. A little hush fell upon the school, too, and Janice
was aware that both girls and boys were turning about in their seats to
look at her.

"Come in," said Mics Scattergood. "Scholars, attention! Eyes forward!"

She might as well have spoken to the wind that breathed at the open
window and fluttered the papers upon her desk. The older scholars paid
the little school-mistress no attention whatsoever.

Janice felt some little confusion in passing down the aisle, knowing
herself to be the center of all eyes. Miss Scattergood dismissed the
class before her briefly, and offered Janice a chair on the platform.

"I guess you're Jason Day's niece," said the teacher, pleasantly,
taking her visitor's hand. "Mother was tel