“Oh, will you really?” she exclaimed, a radiant smile lighting up her troubled face.  “I’ll bring them right away.  How kind, how very kind you are, to bother with my sums, when you have so much Greek in your head!” And, obeying an impulse, as she so often did, she caught his hand in both her own and kissed it heartily.  Then she skimmed across the parlor, and he heard her child’s voice “lilting lightly up the” stairs as he stood—­in a position suggestive of Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works—­gazing fixedly at the hand which she had kissed.

“She regards me as a father,” he said to himself severely.  “Am I going mad?  Or becoming childish?  No; I am only sixty.  But, even if it were possible, it would be base, unmanly, to take advantage of her loneliness, her gratitude.  No, I will be firm.”

So, when the offending “example” was handed to him, with the above-quoted touching statement as to its total depravity, he looked only at the slate.  Gently and patiently, as if to a little child, he pointed out the errors and expounded the rule, amply rewarded by her joyful exclamation, “Oh, I see exactly how it’s done, now!  You do explain things beautifully.  I really think I could have learned a good deal if I’d had a teacher like you when I went to school.”

“Come to me whenever your lessons perplex you, my dear,” he answered, still looking at the slate; “come freely, as if—­as if I were your father.”

“Ah, how kind, how good you are to me!” she cried, seizing his slender, wrinkled hand and holding it between her soft palms.  “How glad papa must be to know it!  It almost seems like having him again.  Must you go?  Good-night.”

And, innocently, as if to her father, she held up her face for a kiss.

The professor turned red, turned pale, hesitated, faltered, and then kissed her reverently on her forehead,—­or, if the truth must be told, on her soft, frizzled hair, which, according to the fashion of the day, hung almost over her eyes.

Two evenings in the week after this were devoted to arithmetic.  The professor was firm—­as a rule; but when her joyous “Oh, I see exactly how it’s done, now!” followed his patient reiteration of rules and explanations, how could he help rewarding himself by a glance at the glowing face? how could he keep his eyes permanently fixed upon that stony-hearted slate?

So it went on through the winter and spring, till it was nearing the time for the summer vacation.  The professor knew only too well that Rosamond had been invited to spend it with some distant cousins,—­distant in both senses of the word,—­and that on her return she would be swallowed up by the academy and would brighten the dingy boarding-house no more.  How could he bear it?  His arid, silent life had never had a song in it before.  Must the song die out in silence?

When the last evening came, and when, realizing the long separation before them, she once more held up her face for a kiss, with trembling lips and blue eyes swimming in tears, as she told him how she should miss him, how she did not see what she should do without him, his hardly-won firmness was as chaff before the wind.  He implored her to marry him; he told her of the beautiful home he would make for her.