By the time school was out that day the news had leaped across Brampton Street and spread up and down both sides of it that the new teacher had been dismissed.  The story ran fairly straight—­there were enough clews, certainly.  The great man’s return, the visit of Mr. Dodd, the call on Judge Graves, all had been marked.  The fiat of the first citizen had gone forth that the ward of Jethro Bass must be got rid of; the designing young woman who had sought to entrap his son must be punished for her amazing effrontery.

Cynthia came out of school happily unaware that her name was on the lips of Brampton:  unaware, too, that the lord of the place had come into residence that day.  She had looked forward to living in the same town with Bob’s father as an evil which was necessary to be borne, as one of the things which are more or less inevitable in the lives of those who have to make their own ways in the world.  The children trooped around her, and the little girls held her hand, and she talked and laughed with them as she came up the street in the eyes of Brampton,—­came up the street to the block of new buildings where the bank was.  Stepping out of the bank, with that businesslike alertness which characterized him, was the first citizen—­none other.  He found himself entangled among the romping children and—­horror of horrors he bumped into the schoolmistress herself!  Worse than this, he had taken off his hat and begged her pardon before he looked at her and realized the enormity of his mistake.  And the schoolmistress had actually paid no attention to him, but with merely heightened color had drawn the children out of his way and passed on without a word.  The first citizen, raging inwardly, but trying to appear unconcerned, walked rapidly back to his house.  On the street of his own town, before the eyes of men, he had been snubbed by a school-teacher.  And such a schoolteacher!

Mr. Worthington, as he paced his library burning with the shame of this occurrence, remembered that he had had to glance at her twice before it came over him who she was.  His first sensation had been astonishment.  And now, in spite of his bitter anger, he had to acknowledge that the face had made an impression on him—­a fact that only served to increase his rage.  A conviction grew upon him that it was a face which his son, or any other man, would not be likely to forget.  He himself could not forget it.

In the meantime Cynthia had reached her home, her cheeks still smarting, conscious that people had stared at her.  This much, of course, she knew—­that Brampton believed Bob Worthington to be in love with her:  and the knowledge at such times made her so miserable that the thought of Jethro’s isolation alone deterred her from asking Miss Lucretia Penniman for a position in Boston.  For she wrote to Miss Lucretia about her life and her reading, as that lady had made her promise to do.  She sat down now at the cherry chest of drawers that was also a desk, to write:  not to pour out her troubles, for she never had done that,—­but to calm her mind by drawing little character sketches of her pupils.  But she had only written the words, “My dear Miss Lucretia,” when she looked out of the window and saw Judge Graves coming up the path, and ran to open the door for him.