re's anything I
hate it's having a girl breathing round me. Yes, you were! I felt it in
my hair. And YOU too--you're always snoopin' and snoodgin'. Oh, yes,
you want to know WHY I've got an extry copy-book and another 'Rithmetic,
Miss Curiosity. Well, what would you give to know? Want to see if
they're PRETTY" (with infinite scorn at the adjective). "No, they ain't
PRETTY. That's all you girls think about--what's PRETTY and what's
curious! Quit now! Come! Don't ye see teacher lookin' at you? Ain't you
ashamed?"

He caught the master's beckoning eye and came forward, slightly abashed,
with a flush of irritation still on his handsome face, and his chestnut
curls slightly rumpled. One, which Octavia had covertly accented by
twisting round her forefinger, stood up like a crest on his head.

"I've told Uncle Ben that you might help him here after school hours,"
said the master, taking him aside. "You may therefore omit your writing
exercise in the morning and do it in the afternoon."

The boy's dark eyes sparkled. "And if it would be all the same to you,
sir," he added earnestly, "you might sorter give out in school that I
was to be kept in."

"I'm afraid that would hardly do," said the master, much amused. "But
why?"

Rupert's color deepened. "So ez to keep them darned girls from foolin'
round me and followin' me back here."

"We will attend to that," said the master smiling; a moment after he
added more seriously, "I suppose your father knows that you are to
receive money for this? And he doesn't object?"

"He! Oh no!" returned Rupert with a slight look of astonishment, and
the same general suggestion of patronizing his progenitor that he had
previously shown to his younger brother. "You needn't mind HIM." In
reality Filgee pere, a widower of two years' standing, had tacitly
allowed the discipline of his family to devolve upon Rupert. Remembering
this, the master could only say, "Very well," and good-naturedly dismiss
the pupil to his seat and the subject from his mind. The last laggard
had just slipped in, the master had glanced over the occupied benches
with his hand upon his warning bell, when there was a quick step on the
gravel, a flutter of skirts like the sound of alighting birds, and a
young woman lightly entered.

In the rounded, untouched, and untroubled freshness of her cheek and
chin, and the forward droop of her slender neck, she appeared a girl
of fifteen; in her developed figure and the maturer dra