t, Tillie, as he was leaving, rose
from her corn-husking in the barn to go with him to the gate, but her
father interfered.

"You stay where you're at!"

With burning face, she turned to her work. And Fairchilds, carefully
suppressing an impulse to shake Jake Getz till his teeth rattled,
walked quietly out of the gate and up the road.

Her father was more than usually stern and exacting with her in these
days of her suspension from meeting, inasmuch as it involved her
dismissal from the hotel and the consequent loss to him of two dollars
a week.

As for Tillie, she found a faint consolation in the fact of the
teacher's evident chagrin and indignation at the tyrannical rule which
forbade intercourse between them.

At stated intervals, the brethren came to reason with her, but while
she expressed her willingness to put her curls back, she would not
acknowledge that her heart was no longer "carnal and vain," and so they
found it impossible to restore her to favor.

A few weeks before Christmas, Absalom, deciding that he had imbibed all
the arithmetical erudition he could hold, stopped school. On the
evening that he took his books home, he gave the teacher a parting
blow, which he felt sure quite avenged the outrageous defeat he had
suffered at his hands on that Sunday night at the hotel.

"Me and Tillie's promised. It ain't put out yet, but I conceited I'd
better tell you, so's you wouldn't be wastin' your time tryin' to make
up to her."

"You and Tillie are engaged to be married?" Fairchilds incredulously
asked.

"That's what! As good as, anyways. I always get somepin I want when I
make up my mind oncet." And he grinned maliciously.

Fairchilds pondered the matter as, with depressed spirits, he walked
home over the frozen road.

"No wonder the poor girl yielded to the pressure of such an
environment," he mused. "I suppose she thinks Absalom's rule will not
be so bad as her father's. But that a girl like Tillie should be pushed
to the wall like that--it is horrible! And yet--if she were worthy a
better fate would she not have held out?--it is too bad, it is unjust
to her 'Miss Margaret' that she should give up now! I feel," he sadly
told himself, "disappointed in Tillie!"

When the notable "Columbus Celebration" came off in New Canaan, in
which event several schools of the township united to participate, and
which was attended by the entire countryside, as if it were a funeral,
Tillie hoped that here would