d, rugged, unkempt little man known
as "the Doc," and as the transient guests were very few and far
between, Miss Margaret shared the life of the hotel-keeper's family on
an intimate and familiar footing.
The invincible custom of New Canaan of using a bedroom only at night
made her unheard-of inclination to sit in her room during the day or
before bedtime the subject of so much comment and wonder that, feeling
it best to yield to the prejudice, she usually read, sewed, or wrote
letters in the kitchen, or, when a fire was lighted, in the combination
dining-room and sitting-room.
It was the evening of the day of Tillie's confession about "Ivanhoe,"
and Miss Margaret, after the early supper-hour of the country hotel,
had gone to the sitting-room, removed the chenille cover from the
centre-table, uncorked the bottle of fluid sold at the village store as
ink, but looking more like raspberryade, and settled herself to write,
to one deeply interested in everything which interested her, an account
of her day and its episode with the little daughter of Jacob Getz.
This room in which she sat, like all other rooms of the district, was
too primly neat to be cozy or comfortable. It contained a bright new
rag carpet, a luridly painted wooden settee, a sewing-machine, and
several uninviting wooden chairs. Margaret often yearned to pull the
pieces of furniture out from their stiff, sentinel-like stations
against the wall and give to the room that divine touch of homeyness
which it lacked. But she did not dare venture upon such a liberty.
Very quickly absorbed in her letter-writing, she did not notice the
heavy footsteps which presently sounded across the floor and paused at
her chair.
"Now that there writin'--" said a gruff voice at her shoulder; and,
startled, she quickly turned in her chair, to find the other boarder,
"the Doc," leaning on the back of it, his shaggy head almost on a level
with her fair one.
"That there writin'," pursued the doctor, continuing to hold his fat
head in unabashed proximity to her own and to her letter, "is wonderful
easy to read. Wonderful easy."
Miss Margaret promptly covered her letter with a blotter, corked the
raspberry-ade, and rose.
"Done a'ready?" asked the doctor.
"For the present, yes."
"See here oncet, Teacher!"
He suddenly fixed her with his small, keen eyes as he drew from the
pocket of his shabby, dusty coat a long, legal-looking paper.
"I have here," he said impr
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