Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil once more in the close communion of old.  The child seemed to notice the change in the master’s manner, which had of late been constrained, and in one of their long postprandial walks she stopped suddenly, and mounting a stump, looked full in his face with big, searching eyes.  “You ain’t mad?” said she, with an interrogative shake of the black braids.  “No.”  “Nor bothered?” “No.”  “Nor hungry?” (Hunger was to Mliss a sickness that might attack a person at any moment.) “No.”  “Nor thinking of her?” “Of whom, Lissy?” “That white girl.” (This was the latest epithet invented by Mliss, who was a very dark brunette, to express Clytemnestra.) “No.”  “Upon your word?” (A substitute for “Hope you’ll die!” proposed by the master.) “Yes.”  “And sacred honor?” “Yes.”  Then Mliss gave him a fierce little kiss, and, hopping down, fluttered off.  For two or three days after that she condescended to appear more like other children, and be, as she expressed it, “good.”

Two years had passed since the master’s advent at Smith’s Pocket, and as his salary was not large, and the prospects of Smith’s Pocket eventually becoming the capital of the State not entirely definite, he contemplated a change.  He had informed the school trustees privately of his intentions, but educated young men of unblemished moral character being scarce at that time, he consented to continue his school term through the winter to early spring.  None else knew of his intention except his one friend, a Dr. Duchesne, a young Creole physician known to the people of Wingdam as “Duchesny.”  He never mentioned it to Mrs. Morpher, Clytie, or any of his scholars.  His reticence was partly the result of a constitutional indisposition to fuss, partly a desire to be spared the questions and surmises of vulgar curiosity, and partly that he never really believed he was going to do anything before it was done.

He did not like to think of Mliss.  It was a selfish instinct, perhaps, which made him try to fancy his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic, and unpractical.  He even tried to imagine that she would do better under the control of an older and sterner teacher.  Then she was nearly eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red Mountain, would be a woman.  He had done his duty.  After Smith’s death he addressed letters to Smith’s relatives, and received one answer from a sister of Melissa’s mother.  Thanking the master, she stated her intention of leaving the Atlantic States for California with her husband in a few months.  This was a slight superstructure for the airy castle which the master pictured for Mliss’s home, but it was easy to fancy that some loving, sympathetic woman, with the claims of kindred, might better guide her wayward nature.  Yet, when the master had read the letter, Mliss listened to it carelessly, received it submissively, and afterward cut figures out of it with her scissors, supposed to represent Clytemnestra, labeled “the white girl,” to prevent mistakes, and impaled them upon the outer walls of the schoolhouse.