l, and had been for a week a full-fledged pupil at the Wareham
Seminary, towards which goal she had been speeding ever since the
memorable day when she rode into Riverboro on the top of Uncle Jerry
Cobb's stagecoach, and told him that education was intended to be "the
making of her."

She went to and fro, with Emma Jane and the other Riverboro boys and
girls, on the morning and evening trains that ran between the academy
town and Milliken's Mills.

The six days had passed like a dream!--a dream in which she sat in
corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed;
stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart
failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted
the committee when reading at sight from "King Lear," but somewhat
discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United
States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have
mentioned it, but if so she had not remembered it.

In these first weeks among strangers she passed for nothing but an
interesting-looking, timid, innocent, country child, never revealing,
even to the far-seeing Emily Maxwell, a hint of her originality,
facility, or power in any direction. Rebecca was fourteen, but so
slight, and under the paralyzing new conditions so shy, that she
would have been mistaken for twelve had it not been for her general
advancement in the school curriculum.

Growing up in the solitude of a remote farm house, transplanted to a
tiny village where she lived with two elderly spinsters, she was still
the veriest child in all but the practical duties and responsibilities
of life; in those she had long been a woman.

It was Saturday afternoon; her lessons for Monday were all learned and
she burst into the brick house sitting-room with the flushed face and
embarrassed mien that always foreshadowed a request. Requests were more
commonly answered in the negative than in the affirmative at the brick
house, a fact that accounted for the slight confusion in her demeanor.

"Aunt Miranda," she began, "the fishman says that Clara Belle Simpson
wants to see me very much, but Mrs. Fogg can't spare her long at a time,
you know, on account of the baby being no better; but Clara Belle could
walk a mile up, and I a mile down the road, and we could meet at the
pink house half way. Then we could rest and talk an hour or so, and both
be back in time for our suppers. I've fed the cat; she had no a