ing glance on Prof.
Easton, and then looked down with a flushed and disappointed face. He
was not equal to a bold spreading of his professed colors. He laughed,
not easily, or as if he enjoyed the sharp words veiled so thinly by
pleasantry, but as if he were in an awkward position, and did not see
his way out.

"You were just a little hard on Miss Wilbur in your selections, you must
remember," he said at last. "People can always be excused for more or
less sombreness on the first day of the term."

And then he went away hurriedly, as if he desired to avoid anything
further in that strain.

Hard on Miss Wilbur? Did he suppose she cared for such vapid nonsense?
What surprised and hurt her was that he so utterly ignored the question
at issue. Did he, a professed Christian of many years' standing, see no
impropriety in this manner of quoting the very words of the Lord
himself! or hadn't he sufficient moral courage to rebuke it? Either
conclusion was distasteful; especially distasteful to her, Marion found,
because the one in question was Prof. Easton. Hitherto she had held him
a little above the ordinary. Was he then so _very_ common after all?

This little occurrence did not serve to sweeten her day. The more so,
that after she had quieted down a little, at noon, she tried to join the
other teachers as usual, and felt an air of stiffness, or embarrassment,
or unnaturalness, of some sort, in their manner to her. Twice, as she
came toward them, Miss Banks, who was talking volubly, hushed into
sudden and utter silence.

After that, Marion went into the upper hall and ate her lunch by
herself. Matters grew worse, rather than better, as the afternoon
session dragged its slow hours along. The air of the school-room seemed
close and unbearable, and the moment a window was raised the driving
rain rushed in and tormented the victim who sat nearest to it.

Poor Marion, who was as susceptible to the temperature of rooms as a
thermometer, tried each window in succession during the afternoon, and
came to the desperate conclusion that the rain came from all quarters of
the leaden sky at once.

The spirit of unrest that pervaded the room grew into positive
lawlessness as the day waned, and Marion's tone had taken even unusual
sharpness; her self-command was giving way. Instead of helping, she had
been positively an injury to Allie March; first by the sharpness of her
reprimands, and then by sarcastic comments on her extreme dulln