ts, and if it seems wise to withdraw you later,
we can do so."

Marian gave a long sigh of satisfaction, but said nothing. She was
constantly told that little children should be seen and not heard,
and moreover she thought it might hurt her grandfather's feelings if
she showed too much pleasure at the change. Yet when she gave the
new teacher a glad smile, Miss Dorothy realized that the prospect of
school was a pleasant one to at least one of her pupils.

_CHAPTER III_

_A New Road_

Instead of sitting in a straight-backed chair in her grandfather's
study, conning over dry lessons while Mr. Otway wrote or read, it
was quite a different experience for Marian to go to school to Miss
Dorothy in a cheerful little schoolhouse where twenty other girls
were seated each before her particular desk. Lessons with Grandpa
Otway had been very stupid, for he required literal, word-for-word,
gotten-by-heart pages, had no mercy upon faulty spelling, and
frowned down mistakes in arithmetic examples. He did not make much
of a point of writing, for he wrote a queer, scratchy hand himself,
and so Marian could scarcely form her letters legibly, a fact of
which she was made ashamed when she saw how well Ruth Deering wrote,
and discovered that Marjorie Stone sent a letter every week to her
brother at college.

However, the rest of it was such an improvement upon other years,
that every morning Marian started out very happily, book bag on arm,
and Miss Dorothy by her side. The first day was the most eventful,
of course, and the child was in a quiver of excitement. Her teacher
was perhaps not less nervous, though she did not show it except by
the two red spots upon her cheeks. It was her first day as teacher
as well as Marian's, as one of a class in school. But all passed off
well, the twenty little girls with shining faces and fresh frocks
were expectant and the new teacher quite came up to their hopes.
Marian already knew Ruth Deering and Marjorie Stone, for they were
in her Sunday-school class, and some of the others she had seen at
church. Alice Evans sat with her parents just in front of the
Otways' pew, so her flaxen pig-tails were a familiar sight, while
Minnie Keating's big brown bow of ribbon appeared further along on
Sunday mornings.

Marian felt that she did quite as well as the other girls in most
things, and was beginning to congratulate herself upon knowing as
much as any one of her age, when she was called to the