inexperienced.'

'Is that the cruellest cut of all?' thought Miss Elmore, as she
beheld her former pupil scarcely restraining herself enough for the
farewell civilities, and then breaking down into a flood of tears.

Her mother hovered over her with, 'What is it? Oh! my dear child,
you need not be afraid; he is so kind!'

'I hate people to be kind, that is the very thing,' said Arthurine,--
'Oh! Miss Elmore, don't go!--while he is meaning all the time that
I have made such a fool of myself! And he is glad, I know he is, he
and his hateful, stupid, stolid daughters.'

'My dear! my dear!' exclaimed her mother.

'Well, haven't they done nothing but thwart me, whatever I wanted to
do, and aren't they triumphing now in this abominable man's
treachery, and my being taken in? I shall go away, and sell the
place, and never come back again.'

'I should think that was the most decided way of confessing a
failure,' said Miss Elmore; and as Mrs. Arthuret was called away by
the imperative summons to the butcher, she spoke more freely. 'Your
mother looks terrified at being so routed up again.'

'Oh, mother will be happy anywhere; and how can I stay with these
stick-in-the-mud people, just like what I have read about?'

'And have gibbeted! Really, Arthurine, I should call them very
generous!'

'It is their thick skins,' muttered she; 'at least so the Myttons
said; but, indeed, I did not mean to be so personal as it was
thought.'

'But tell me. Why did you not get on with Mesa?'

'That was a regular take-in. Not to tell one! When I began my
German class, she put me out with useless explanations.'

'What kind of explanations?'

'Oh, about the Swiss being under the Empire, or something, and she
_WOULD_ go into parallels of Saxon words, and English poetry, such
as our Fraulein never troubled us with. But I showed her it would
not _DO_.'

'So instead of learning what you had not sense to appreciate, you
wanted to teach your old routine.'

'But, indeed, she could not pronounce at all well, and she looked
ever so long at difficult bits, and then she even tried to correct
_ME_.'

'Did she go on coming after you silenced her?'

'Yes, and never tried to interfere again.'

'I am afraid she drew her own conclusions about High Schools.'

'Oh, Miss Elmore, you used to like us to be thorough and not
discursive, and how could anybody brought up in this stultifying
place, ages ago, know what will tell in an exam?'