With burning face, she turned to her work.  And Fairchilds, carefully suppressing an impulse to shake Jake Getz till his teeth rattled, walked quietly out of the gate and up the road.

Her father was more than usually stern and exacting with her in these days of her suspension from meeting, inasmuch as it involved her dismissal from the hotel and the consequent loss to him of two dollars a week.

As for Tillie, she found a faint consolation in the fact of the teacher’s evident chagrin and indignation at the tyrannical rule which forbade intercourse between them.

At stated intervals, the brethren came to reason with her, but while she expressed her willingness to put her curls back, she would not acknowledge that her heart was no longer “carnal and vain,” and so they found it impossible to restore her to favor.

A few weeks before Christmas, Absalom, deciding that he had imbibed all the arithmetical erudition he could hold, stopped school.  On the evening that he took his books home, he gave the teacher a parting blow, which he felt sure quite avenged the outrageous defeat he had suffered at his hands on that Sunday night at the hotel.

“Me and Tillie’s promised.  It ain’t put out yet, but I conceited I’d better tell you, so’s you wouldn’t be wastin’ your time tryin’ to make up to her.”

“You and Tillie are engaged to be married?” Fairchilds incredulously asked.

“That’s what!  As good as, anyways.  I always get somepin I want when I make up my mind oncet.”  And he grinned maliciously.

Fairchilds pondered the matter as, with depressed spirits, he walked home over the frozen road.

“No wonder the poor girl yielded to the pressure of such an environment,” he mused.  “I suppose she thinks Absalom’s rule will not be so bad as her father’s.  But that a girl like Tillie should be pushed to the wall like that—­it is horrible!  And yet—­if she were worthy a better fate would she not have held out?—­it is too bad, it is unjust to her ‘Miss Margaret’ that she should give up now!  I feel,” he sadly told himself, “disappointed in Tillie!”

When the notable “Columbus Celebration” came off in New Canaan, in which event several schools of the township united to participate, and which was attended by the entire countryside, as if it were a funeral, Tillie hoped that here would be an opportunity for seeing and speaking with Walter Fairchilds.  But in this she was bitterly disappointed.

It was not until a week later, at the township Institute, which met at New Canaan, and which was also attended by the entire population, that her deep desire was gratified.

It was during the reading of an address, before the Institute, by Miss Spooner, the teacher at East Donegal, that Fairchilds deliberately came and sat by Tillie in the back of the school-room.

Tillie’s heart beat fast, and she found herself doubting the reality of his precious nearness after the long, dreary days of hungering for him.