The day went by like a dream.  Anne could never clearly recall it afterwards.  It almost seemed as if it were not she who was teaching but somebody else.  She heard classes and worked sums and set copies mechanically.  The children behaved quite well; only two cases of discipline occurred.  Morley Andrews was caught driving a pair of trained crickets in the aisle.  Anne stood Morley on the platform for an hour and . . . which Morley felt much more keenly . . . confiscated his crickets.  She put them in a box and on the way from school set them free in Violet Vale; but Morley believed, then and ever afterwards, that she took them home and kept them for her own amusement.

The other culprit was Anthony Pye, who poured the last drops of water from his slate bottle down the back of Aurelia Clay’s neck.  Anne kept Anthony in at recess and talked to him about what was expected of gentlemen, admonishing him that they never poured water down ladies’ necks.  She wanted all her boys to be gentlemen, she said.  Her little lecture was quite kind and touching; but unfortunately Anthony remained absolutely untouched.  He listened to her in silence, with the same sullen expression, and whistled scornfully as he went out.  Anne sighed; and then cheered herself up by remembering that winning a Pye’s affections, like the building of Rome, wasn’t the work of a day.  In fact, it was doubtful whether some of the Pyes had any affections to win; but Anne hoped better things of Anthony, who looked as if he might be a rather nice boy if one ever got behind his sullenness.

When school was dismissed and the children had gone Anne dropped wearily into her chair.  Her head ached and she felt woefully discouraged.  There was no real reason for discouragement, since nothing very dreadful had occurred; but Anne was very tired and inclined to believe that she would never learn to like teaching.  And how terrible it would be to be doing something you didn’t like every day for . . . well, say forty years.  Anne was of two minds whether to have her cry out then and there, or wait till she was safely in her own white room at home.  Before she could decide there was a click of heels and a silken swish on the porch floor, and Anne found herself confronted by a lady whose appearance made her recall a recent criticism of Mr. Harrison’s on an overdressed female he had seen in a Charlottetown store.  “She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare.”

The newcomer was gorgeously arrayed in a pale blue summer silk, puffed, frilled, and shirred wherever puff, frill, or shirring could possibly be placed.  Her head was surmounted by a huge white chiffon hat, bedecked with three long but rather stringy ostrich feathers.  A veil of pink chiffon, lavishly sprinkled with huge black dots, hung like a flounce from the hat brim to her shoulders and floated off in two airy streamers behind her.  She wore all the jewelry that could be crowded on one small woman, and a very strong odor of perfume attended her.