“Well?” Miss Margaret gently urged her faltering speech.

“He whipped me and—­and burnt up your Book!”

“Whipped you again!” Miss Margaret’s soft voice indignantly exclaimed.  “The br—­” she checked herself and virtuously closed her lips.  “I’m so sorry, Tillie, that I got you into such a scrape!”

Tillie thought Miss Margaret could not have heard her clearly.

“He—­burnt up your book yet, Miss Margaret!” she found voice to whisper again.

“Indeed!  I ought to make him pay for it!”

“He didn’t know it was yourn, Miss Margaret—­he don’t uphold to novel-readin’, and if he’d know it was yourn he’d have you put out of William Penn, so I tole him I lent it off of Elviny Dinkleberger—­and I’ll help you Fridays till it’s paid for a’ready, if you’ll leave me, Miss Margaret!”

She lifted pleading eyes to the teacher’s face, to see therein a look of anger such as she had never before beheld in that gentle countenance—­for Miss Margaret had caught sight of the marks of the strap on Tillie’s bare neck, and she was flushed with indignation at the outrage.  But Tillie, interpreting the anger to be against herself, turned as white as death, and a look of such hopeless woe came into her face that Miss Margaret suddenly realized the dread apprehension torturing the child.

“Come here to me, you poor little thing!” she tenderly exclaimed, drawing the little girl into her lap and folding her to her heart.  “I don’t care anything about the book, honey!  Did you think I would?  There, there—­don’t cry so, Tillie, don’t cry. I love you, don’t you know I do!”—­and Miss Margaret kissed the child’s quivering lips, and with her own fragrant handkerchief wiped the tears from her cheeks, and with her soft, cool fingers smoothed back the hair from her hot forehead.

And this child, who had never known the touch of a mother’s hand and lips, was transported in that moment from the suffering of the past night and morning, to a happiness that made this hour stand out to her, in all the years that followed, as the one supreme experience of her childhood.

Ineffable tenderness of the mother heart of woman!

That afternoon, when Tillie got home from school,—­ten minutes late according to the time allowed her by her father,—­she was quite unable to go out to help him in the field.  Every step of the road home had been a dragging burden to her aching limbs, and the moment she reached the farm-house, she tumbled in a little heap upon the kitchen settee and lay there, exhausted and white, her eyes shining with fever, her mouth parched with thirst, her head throbbing with pain—­feeling utterly indifferent to the consequences of her tardiness and her failure to meet her father in the field.

“Ain’t you feelin’ good?” her stepmother phlegmatically inquired from across the room, where she sat with a dish-pan in her lap, paring potatoes for supper.