uld be read as easily as print.

"And the Arithmetic?"

"Oh, I haven't tackled that yet. That is for winter evenings, when my
fire burns on the hearth and the wind blows and nobody in the world cares
for me."

"Then it won't be _this_ winter," said Marjorie, lifting her eyes from
the binding of the dictionary.

"Why not?" he questioned.

"Because somebody cares for you," she answered gravely.

He laughed and shoved his manuscript into the desk. He was thinking of
her as he raised his head from the desk this afternoon and found the sun
gone down; he thought of her and remembered that he had promised to call
to see her to-night. Was it to take tea? He dreaded tea-parties, when
everybody talked and nobody said anything. A dim remembrance of being
summoned to supper a while ago flashed through his mind; but it hardly
mattered--Mrs. Devoe would take her cup of tea alone and leave his fruit
and bread and milk standing on the tea-table; it was better so, she would
not pester him with questions while he was eating, ask him why he did not
take more exercise, and if his room were not suffocating this hot day,
and if he did not think a cup of good, strong tea would not be better for
him than that bowl of milk!

Mrs. Devoe, a widow of sixty-five, and her cat, Dolly, aged nineteen,
kept house and boarded the school-master. Her house was two miles nearer
the shore than the school-building, but he preferred the walk in all
weathers and he liked the view of the water. Mrs. Devoe had never kept a
boarder before, her small income being amply sufficient for her small
wants, but she liked the master, he split her wood and his own, locked
the house up at night, made no trouble, paid his board, two dollars per
week, regularly in advance, never went out at night, often read to her in
the evening after her own eyes had given out, and would have been perfect
if he had allowed her to pile away his books and sweep his chamber every
Friday.

"But no man is perfect," she had sighed to Mrs. Rheid, "even my poor
husband would keep dinner waiting."

After a long, absent-minded look over the meadows towards the sea, where
the waves were darkening in the twilight, he arose in haste, threw off
his wrapper, a gray merino affair, trimmed with quilted crimson silk,
that Prudence had given him on a birthday three years ago, and went to
the wash-stand to bathe his face and brush back that mass of black hair.
He did not study his features as Prudenc