continued to devour all the
books she could lay hold of and to run perilous risks for the sake of
the delight she found in them.

Miss Margaret stood to her for an image of every heroine of whom she
read in prose or verse, and for the realization of all the romantic
day-dreams in which, as an escape from the joyless and sordid life of
her home, she was learning to live and move and have her being.

Therefore it came to her as a heavy blow indeed when, just after the
Christmas holidays, her father announced to her on the first morning of
the reopening of school, "You best make good use of your time from now
on, Tillie, fur next spring I'm takin' you out of school."

Tillie's face turned white, and her heart thumped in her breast so that
she could not speak.

"You're comin' twelve year old," her father continued, "and you're
enough educated, now, to do you. Me and mom needs you at home."

It never occurred to Tillie to question or discuss a decision of her
father's. When he spoke it was a finality and one might as well rebel
at the falling of the snow or rain. Tillie's woe was utterly hopeless.

Her dreary, drooping aspect in the next few days was noticed by Miss
Margaret.

"Pop's takin' me out of school next spring," she heart-brokenly said
when questioned. "And when I can't see you every day, Miss Margaret, I
won't feel for nothin' no more. And I thought to get more educated than
what I am yet. I thought to go to school till I was anyways fourteen."

So keenly did Miss Margaret feel the outrage and wrong of Tillie's
arrested education, when her father could well afford to keep her in
school until she was grown, if he would; so stirred was her warm
Southern blood at the thought of the fate to which poor Tillie seemed
doomed--the fate of a household drudge with not a moment's leisure from
sunrise to night for a thought above the grubbing existence of a
domestic beast of burden (thus it all looked to this woman from
Kentucky), that she determined, cost what it might, to go herself to
appeal to Mr. Getz.

"He will have me 'chased off of William Penn,'" she ruefully told
herself. "And the loss just now of my munificent salary of thirty-five
dollars a month would be inconvenient. 'The Doc' said he would 'stand
by' me. But that might be more inconvenient still!" she thought, with a
little shudder. "I suppose this is an impolitic step for me to take.
But policy 'be blowed,' as the doctor would say! What are we in this