gone over, and experience had demonstrated
that the only place where she could be free from interruptions was the
schoolroom itself. At the perfect boarding house the shrill tones of
Keturah's voice and those of Miss Phinney and Mrs. Tripp penetrated
through shut doors. It is hard to figure percentages when the most
intimate details of Bayport's family life are being recited and gloated
over on the other side of a thin partition. And when Matilda undertook
to defend the Come-Outer faith against the assaults of the majority, the
verbal riot was, as Mr. Tidditt described it, "like feedin' time in a
parrot shop."

So Miss Phoebe came to the boarding house for supper and then returned
to the schoolroom, where, with a lighted bracket lamp beside her on the
desk, she labored until nine o'clock. Then she put on her coat and hat,
extinguished the light, locked the door, and started on her lonely walk
home.

"The main road" in our village is dark after nine o clock. There is
a street light--a kerosene lamp--on a post in front of the Methodist
meeting house, but the sexton forgets it, generally speaking, or, at
any rate, neglects to fill it except at rare intervals. Simmons's front
windows are ablaze, of course, and so are the dingy panes of Simpson's
barber shop. But these two centers of sociability are both at the depot
road corner, and when they are passed the only sources of illumination
are the scattered gleams from the back windows of dwellings. As most
of us retire by half-past eight, the glow along the main road is not
dazzling, to say the very least.

Miss Dawes was not afraid of the dark. She had been her own escort for
a good many years. She walked briskly on, heard the laughter and loud
voices in the barber shop die away behind her, passed the schoolhouse
pond, now bleak and chill with the raw November wind blowing across it,
and began to climb the slope of Whittaker's Hill. And here the wind,
rushing in unimpeded over the flooded salt meadows from the tumbled
bay outside, wound her skirts about her and made climbing difficult and
breath-taking.

She was, perhaps, half way up the long slope, when she heard, in the
intervals between the gusts, footsteps behind her. She knew most of
the village people by this time and the thought of company was not
unpleasant. So she paused and pantingly waited for whoever was coming.
She could not see more than a few yards, but the footsteps sounded
nearer and nearer, and, a momen