se. Its
pleasant murmur could not be shut out. The school trustees had built
the windows high, so that the children might not be diverted from their
lessons by any sight of occasional passers-by. As though children could
study better in a prison! As though you could shut in a child's mind,
traveling in its vagrant fancies like Prospero's Ariel round about the
earth in twenty minutes! The dull sound of a horse's hoofs would come
in now and then from the road, and the children, longing for some new
sight, would spend the next half hour in mental debate whether it could
have been a boy astride a bag of turnips, for instance, or the doctor
in his gig, that had passed under the windows.

It was getting late in the afternoon. Miss Tucker had dominated her
little flock faithfully all day, until even she grew tired of
monotonous despotism. Perhaps the drowsy, distant sounds--the cawing of
crows far away, the almost inaudible rattle of a mowing machine, and
the unvarying gurgle of the brook near at hand--had softened Miss
Tucker's temper. More likely it had made her sleepy, for she relaxed
her watchfulness so much that Rob Riley had time to look at the radiant
face of Henrietta full two minutes without a rebuke. At last Miss
Tucker actually yawned two or three times. Then she brought herself up
with a guilty start. Full twenty minutes had passed in which she,
Rebecca--or, as she pronounced it, Rebekker--Tucker, schoolmistress and
intellectual drum-major, had scolded nobody and had scowled at nobody.
She determined to make amends at once for this remissness. Her eye
lighted on Henrietta. It was always safe to light on Henrietta. Miss
Tucker might punish her at any time on general principles and not go
far astray, especially when she sat, as now, bent over her slate.

Henrietta was a girl past sixteen, somewhat tallish, and a little
awkward; her hair was light, her eyes blue, and her face not yet
developed, but there were the crude elements of a possible beauty in
her features. When her temper was aroused, and she gathered up the
habitual slovenly expression of her face into a look of vigor and
concentrated resolution, she was "splendid," in the vocabulary of her
schoolmates. She was one of those country girls who want only the
trimmings to make a fine lady. Rob Riley, for his part, did not miss
the trimmings. Fine lady she was to him, and his admiration for her was
the only thing that interfered with his diligence. For Rob had a