ie West, his favorite among
the girls, was "almost too sweet." He said to himself that he feared she
"lacked character." Marjorie's quiet, observant father would have smiled
at that and said nothing. The teacher said that she did not know how to
take her own part. Marjorie had been eleven years in this grasping world
and had not learned that she had any "part" to take.

Since her pencil had ceased scribbling the room was so still that a tiny
mouse had been nibbling at the toe of her shoe. Just then as she raised
her head and pinned her shawl more securely the door opened and something
happened. The something happened in Marjorie's face. Hollis Rheid thought
the sunset had burst across it. She did not exclaim, "Oh, I am so glad!"
but the gladness was all in her eyes. If Marjorie had been more given to
exclamations her eyes would not have been so expressive. The closed lips
were a gain to the eyes and her friends missed nothing. The boy had
learned her eyes by heart. How stoutly he would have resisted if some one
had told him that years hence Marjorie's face would be a sealed volume to
him.

But she was making her eyes and mouth to-day and years hence she made
them, too. Perhaps he had something to do with it then as he certainly
had something to do with it now.

"I came back with my sled to take you home. I gave Sam my last ten cents
to do the night work for me. It was my turn, but he was willing enough.
Where's your hood, Mousie? Any books to take?"

"Yes, my Geography and Arithmetic," she answered, taking her fleecy white
hood from the seat behind her.

"Now you look like a sunbeam in a cloud," he said poetically as she tied
it over her brown head. "Oh, ho!" turning to the blackboard, "you do make
handsome figures. Got them all right, did you?"

"I knew how to do them, it was only that--I forgot."

"I don't think you'll forget again in a hurry. And that's a nice looking
slate, too," he added, stepping nearer. "Mother said it was too much of a
strain on your nervous system to write all that."

"I guess I haven't much of a nervous system," returned Marjorie,
seriously; "the girls wrote the words they missed fifty times last Friday
and he warned us about the one hundred to-day. I suppose it will be one
hundred and fifty next Friday. I don't believe I'll _ever_ miss again,"
she said, her lips trembling at the mention of it.

"I think I'll have a word or two to say to the master if you do. I wonder
how Linnet woul