her one from doin' it."

"What became of her?" asked Jerome.

"Dead," replied Ozias.

Jerome asked nothing further. It ended in his leaving school and
going to work. This course met with some opposition from his mother,
who had madly ambitious plans for him. She had influenced Elmira to
leave school the year before, that she might earn more, and thereby
enable her brother to study longer, but he knew nothing of that.

However, a plan which Jerome formed for some evening lessons with the
school-master appeased her. It savored of a private tutor like
Lawrence Prescott's. Nobody knew how Ann Edwards had resented Doctor
Prescott's sending his son to Boston to be fitted for college, while
hers could have nothing better than a few terms at the district
school. Her jealous bitterness was enhanced twofold because her poor
husband was gone, and the memory of his ambition for his son stung
her to sharper effort. Often the imagined disappointments of the
dead, when they are still loved and unforgotten, weigh more heavily
upon the living than their own. "I dun'no' what your father would
have said if he'd thought Jerome had got to leave school so young,"
she told Elmira; and her lost husband's grievance in the matter was
nearer her heart than her own.

Jerome's plan for evening lessons did not work long. The
school-master to whom he applied professed his entire readiness, even
enthusiasm, to further such a laudable pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties; but he was young himself, scarcely out of college, and
the pretty girls in his school swayed his impressionable nature into
many side issues, even when his mind was set upon the main track.
Soon Jerome found himself of an evening in the midst of a class of
tittering girls, who also had been fired with zeal for improvement
and classical learning, who conjugated _amo_ with foolish blushes and
glances of sugared sweetness at himself and the teacher. Then he
left.

Jerome at that time felt absolutely no need of the feminine element
in creation, holding himself aloof from it with a patient, because
measureless, superiority. Sometimes in growth the mental strides into
life ahead of the physical; sometimes it is the other way. At
seventeen Jerome's mind took the lead of his body, and the
imaginations thereof, though he was well grown and well favored, and
young girls placed themselves innocently in his way and looked back
for him to follow.

Jerome's cold, bright glances met the