ays and Sundays I can come to town."

The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road
toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was
behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers
could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered
that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so
fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not
glib of thought or speech.

He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard of her
coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not at
all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history
of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival.
That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact
that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip
in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighborhood swains Ben
Westerveld already occupied a position at the top of the column.

He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his
embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and called to
his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded
forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with
natural canine curiosity.

Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping
her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free
hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in
his life that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment
from that time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he never would
have forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking,
quivering body.

Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying: "He won't
hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder
reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so
childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls.
From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter
femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella, the
experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a
queer electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it
something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone.
If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have
r