“Why, of course, of course,” began Father impatiently, looking down at his paper.  “Of course she’ll go to—­” he stopped suddenly.  A complete change came to his face.  He grew red, then white.  His eyes sort of flashed.  “School?” he said then, in a hard, decided voice.  “Oh, no; Mary is not going to school to-morrow morning.”  He looked down to his paper and began to read again.  For him the subject was very evidently closed.  But for Aunt Jane it was not closed.

“You don’t mean, Charles, that she is not to go to school at all, any more,” she gasped.

“Exactly.”  Father read on in his paper without looking up.

“But, Charles, to stop her school like this!”

“Why not?  It closes in a week or two, anyway.”

Aunt Jane’s lips came together hard.

“That’s not the question at all,” she said, cold like ice.  “Charles, I’m amazed at you—­yielding to that child’s whims like this—­that she doesn’t want to go to school!  It’s the principle of the thing that I’m objecting to.  Do you realize what it will lead to—­what it—­”

“Jane!” With a jerk Father sat up straight.  “I realize some things that perhaps you do not.  But that is neither here nor there.  I do not wish Mary to go to school any more this spring.  That is all; and I think—­it is sufficient.”

“Certainly.”  Aunt Jane’s lips came together again grim and hard.  “Perhaps you will be good enough to say what she shall do with her time.”

“Time?  Do?  Why—­er—­what she always does; read, sew, study—­”

“Study?” Aunt Jane asked the question with a hateful little smile that Father would have been blind not to have understood.  And he was equal to it—­but I ’most fell over backward when I found how equal to it he was.

“Certainly,” he says, “study.  I—­I’ll hear her lessons myself—­in the library, after I come home in the afternoon.  Now let us hear no more about it.”

With that he pushed back his plate, stuffed his astronomy paper into his pocket, and left the table, without waiting for dessert.  And Aunt Jane and I were left alone.

I didn’t say anything.  Victors shouldn’t boast—­and I was a victor, of course, about the school.  But when I thought of what Father had said about my reciting my lessons to him every day in the library—­I wasn’t so sure whether I’d won out or not.  Recite lessons to my father?  Why, I couldn’t even imagine such a thing!

Aunt Jane didn’t say anything either.  I guess she didn’t know what to say.  And it was kind of a queer situation, when you came right down to it.  Both of us sitting there and knowing I wasn’t going back to school any more, and I knowing why, and knowing Aunt Jane didn’t know why.  (Of course I hadn’t told Aunt Jane about Mother and Mrs. Mayhew.) It would be a funny world, wouldn’t it, if we all knew what each other was thinking all the time?  Why, we’d get so we wouldn’t do anything but think—­for there wouldn’t any of us speak to each other, I’m afraid, we’d be so angry at what the other was thinking.