thought of the heroic courage with which, in the years to come, she
would surely obey them.

Miss Margaret had promised Tillie that she would write to her, and the
child, overlooking the serious difficulties in the way, had eagerly
promised in return, to answer her letters.

Once a week Mr. Getz called for mail at the village store, and Miss
Margaret's first letter was laboriously read by him on his way out to
the farm.

He found it, on the whole, uninteresting, but he vaguely gathered from
one or two sentences that the teacher, even at the distance of five
miles, was still trying to "plague" him by "siding along with his child
ag'in' her parent."

"See here oncet," he said to Tillie, striding to the kitchen stove on
his return home, the letter in his hand: "this here goes after them
novel-books, in the fire! I ain't leavin' that there woman spoil you
with no such letters like this here. Now you know!"

The gleam of actual wickedness in Tillie's usually soft eyes, as she
saw that longed-for letter tossed into the flames, would have startled
her father had he seen it. The girl trembled from head to foot and
turned a deathly white.

"I hate you, hate you, hate you!" her hot heart was saying as she
literally glared at her tormentor. "I'll never forget this--never,
never; I'll make you suffer for it--I will, I will!"

But her white lips were dumb, and her impotent passion, having no other
outlet, could only tear and bruise her own heart as all the long
morning she worked in a blind fury at her household tasks.

But after dinner she did an unheard-of thing. Without asking
permission, or giving any explanation to either her father or her
stepmother, she deliberately abandoned her usual Saturday afternoon
work of cleaning up (she said to herself that she did not care if the
house rotted), and dressing herself, she walked straight through the
kitchen before her stepmother's very eyes, and out of the house.

Her father was out in the fields when she undertook this high-handed
step; and her mother was so dumb with amazement at such unusual
behavior that she offered but a weak protest.

"What'll pop say to your doin' somepin like this here!" she called
querulously after Tillie as she followed her across the kitchen to the
door. "He'll whip you, Tillie; and here's all the sweepin' to be did--"

There was a strange gleam in Tillie's eyes before which the woman
shrank and held her peace. The girl swept past her, almost