en you come back from an urrand. It's early yet--you dare stop awhile
and talk to Lizzie."

Tillie gave her aunt a look of grateful affection as she left the
house. Often when she longed to thank her for her many little acts of
kindness, the words would not come. It was the habit of her life to
repress every emotion of her mind, whether of bitterness or pleasure,
and an unconquerable shyness seized upon her in any least attempt to
reveal herself to those who were good to her.

It was four o'clock on a beautiful October afternoon as she walked up
the village street, and while she enjoyed, through all her sensitive
maiden soul, the sweet sunshine and soft autumn coloring, her thought
dwelt with a pleasant expectancy on her almost inevitable meeting with
"the Teacher," if he did indeed arrive in the stage now due at New
Canaan.

Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie
Hershey, Tillie's eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a
feminine hunger for romance. Life as yet had not revealed those
emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss
Margaret--which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment. It was only
because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to
become "educated" that she was interested in his coming.

It was but a few minutes' walk to the home of Jonas Hershey, the
country pork butcher. As Tillie turned in at the gate, she heard, with
a leap of her heart, the distant rumble of the approaching stagecoach.

Jonas Hershey's home was probably the cleanest, neatest-looking red
brick house in all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door
fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds,
almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly
mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by
side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of
the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the
midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across the
garden to the side door which opened into the kitchen. It stood open
and she stepped in without ceremony. For a moment she could see nothing
but red and yellow flowers and whitewashed clam-shells. But as her
vision cleared, she perceived her neighbor, Lizzie Hershey, a
well-built, healthy-looking country lass of eighteen years, cutting
bread at a table, and her mother, a large fat wom