, 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.