“She hadn’t no need to stay all day!” growled Mr. Getz.  “Mom had all Tillie’s work to do, and her own too, and she didn’t get it through all.”

“Well, better let the work than have Tillie havin’ any more of them dangerous swoonds.  Them’s dangerous, I tell you, Jake!  Sometimes folks never comes to, yet!”

Mr. Getz looked at Tillie apprehensively.  “You better go in and get your hot supper, Tillie,” he said, not ungently.

Before this forbearance of her father, Tillie had a feeling of shame in the doctor’s subterfuges, as she bade her loyal friend good night and turned to go indoors.

“You’ll be over to Board meetin’ to-night, ain’t?” the doctor said to Mr. Getz as he picked up the reins.

“To be sure!  Me and Nathaniel Puntz has a statement to make to the Board that’ll chase that tony dude teacher off his job so quick he won’t have time to pack his trunk!”

“Is that so?” the doctor said in feigned surprise.  “Well, he certainly is some tony—­that I must give him, Jake.  Well, good night to yous!  Be careful of Tillie’s health!”

Getz went into the house and the doctor, chuckling to himself, drove away.

Tillie was in bed, but sleep was far from her eyes, when, late that night, she heard her father return from the Board meeting.  Long she lay in her bed, listening with tense nerves to his suppressed tones as he talked to his wife in the room across the hall, but she could not hear what he said.  Not even his tone of voice was sufficiently enlightening as to how affairs had gone.

In her wakefulness the night was agonizingly long; for though she was hopeful of the success of the doctor’s plot, she knew that possibly there might have been some fatal hitch.

At the breakfast-table, next morning, her father looked almost sick, and Tillie’s heart throbbed with unfilial joy in the significance of this.  His manner to her was curt and his face betrayed sullen anger; he talked but little, and did not once refer to the Board meeting in her presence.

It was not until ten o’clock, when he had gone with some of the children to the Evangelical church, that she found her longed-for opportunity to question her stepmother.

“Well,” she began, with assumed indifference, as she and her mother worked together in the kitchen preparing the big Sunday dinner, “did they put the teacher out?”

“If they put him out?” exclaimed Mrs. Getz, slightly roused from her customary apathy.  “Well, I think they didn’t!  What do you think they done yet?”

“I’m sure,” said Tillie, evidently greatly interested in the turnips she was paring, “I don’t know.”

“They raised his salary five a month!”

The turnips dropped into the pan, and Tillie raised her eyes to gaze incredulously into the face of her stepmother, who, with hands on her hips, stood looking down upon her.