“I owe you no thanks, father, for what education I have!” she burst forth.  “You always did everything in your power to hinder me!”

If a bomb had exploded in the midst of them, Mr. and Mrs. Getz could not have been more confounded.  Mrs. Getz looked to see her husband order Tillie from the table, or rise from his place to shake her and box her ears.  But he did neither.  In amazement he stared at her for a moment—­then answered with a mildness that amazed his wife even more than Tillie’s “sassiness” had done.

“I’d of left you study if I’d knowed you could come to anything like this by it.  But I always thought you’d have to go to the Normal to be fit fur a teacher yet.  And you can’t say you don’t owe me no thanks—­ain’t I always kep’ you?”

“Kept me!” answered Tillie, with a scorn that widened her father’s stare and made her stepmother drop her knife on her plate; “I never worked half so hard at Aunty Em’s as I have done here every day of my life since I was nine years old—­and she thought my work worth not only my ‘keep,’ but two dollars a week besides.  When do you ever spend two dollars on me?  You never gave me a dollar that I hadn’t earned ten times over!  You owe me back wages!”

Jake Getz laid down his knife, with a look on his face that made his other children quail.  His countenance was livid with anger.

“Owe you back wages!” he choked.  “Ain’t you my child, then, where I begat and raised?  Don’t I own you?  What’s a child fur?  To grow up to be no use to them that raised it?  You talk like that to me!” he roared.  “You tell me I owe you back money!  Now listen here!  I was a-goin’ to leave you keep five dollars every month out of your forty.  Yes, I conceited I’d leave you have all that—­five a month!  Now fur sassin’ me like what you done, I ain’t leavin’ you have none the first month!”

“And what,” Tillie wondered, a strange calm suddenly following her outburst, as she sat back in her chair, white and silent, “what will he do and say when I refuse to give him more than the price of my board?”

Her school-work, which began nest day, diverted her mind somewhat from its deep yearning for him who had become to her the very breath of her life.

It was on the Sunday night after her first week of teaching that she told Absalom, with all the firmness she could command, that he must not come to see her any more, for she was resolved not to marry him.

“Who are you goin’ to marry, then?” he inquired, unconvinced.

“No one.”

“Do you mean it fur really, that you’d ruther be a’ ole maid?”

“I’d rather be six old maids than the wife of a Dutchman!”

“What fur kind of a man do you want, then?”

“Not the kind that grows in this township.”

“Would you, mebbe,” Absalom sarcastically inquired, “like such a dude like what—­”