Accustomed to be thwarted and opposed, often wantonly and cruelly, for no other purpose than to excite the violent impulses of her nature, the master’s phlegm evidently took her by surprise.  She stopped; she began to twist a lock of her hair between her fingers; and the rigid line of upper lip, drawn over the wicked little teeth, relaxed and quivered slightly.  Then her eyes dropped, and something like a blush struggled up to her cheek and tried to assert itself through the splashes of redder soil, and the sunburn of years.  Suddenly she threw herself forward, calling on God to strike her dead, and fell quite weak and helpless, with her face on the master’s desk, crying and sobbing as if her heart would break.

The master lifted her gently and waited for the paroxysm to pass.  When, with face still averted, she was repeating between her sobs the mea culpa of childish penitence—­that “she’d be good, she didn’t mean to,” etc., it came to him to ask her why she had left Sabbath school.

Why had she left the Sabbath school?—­why?  Oh, yes.  What did he (McSnagley) want to tell her she was wicked for?  What did he tell her that God hated her for?  If God hated her, what did she want to go to Sabbath school for?  She didn’t want to be “beholden” to anybody who hated her.

Had she told McSnagley this?

Yes, she had.

The master laughed.  It was a hearty laugh, and echoed so oddly in the little schoolhouse, and seemed so inconsistent and discordant with the sighing of the pines without, that he shortly corrected himself with a sigh.  The sigh was quite as sincere in its way, however, and after a moment of serious silence he asked about her father.

Her father?  What father?  Whose father?  What had he ever done for her?  Why did the girls hate her?  Come now! what made the folks say, “Old Bummer Smith’s Mliss!” when she passed?  Yes; oh yes.  She wished he was dead—­she was dead—­everybody was dead; and her sobs broke forth anew.

The master then, leaning over her, told her as well as he could what you or I might have said after hearing such unnatural theories from childish lips; only bearing in mind perhaps better than you or I the unnatural facts of her ragged dress, her bleeding feet, and the omnipresent shadow of her drunken father.  Then, raising her to her feet, he wrapped his shawl around her, and, bidding her come early in the morning, he walked with her down the road.  There he bade her “good night.”  The moon shone brightly on the narrow path before them.  He stood and watched the bent little figure as it staggered down the road, and waited until it had passed the little graveyard and reached the curve of the hill, where it turned and stood for a moment, a mere atom of suffering outlined against the far-off patient stars.  Then he went back to his work.  But the lines of the copybook thereafter faded into long parallels of never-ending road, over which childish figures seemed to pass sobbing and crying into the night.  Then, the little schoolhouse seeming lonelier than before, he shut the door and went home.