Had it not been for this all-consuming desire for a letter, she would more keenly have felt her enforced alienation from her aunt, of whom she was so fond; and at the same time have taken really great pleasure in her new work and in having reached at last her long-anticipated goal.

In the meantime, while her secret sorrow—­like Sir Hudibras’s rusting sword that had nothing else to feed upon and so hacked upon itself—­seemed eating out her very heart, the letter which would have been to her as manna in the wilderness had fallen into her father’s hands, and after being laboriously conned by him, to his utter confusion as to its meaning, had been consigned to the kitchen fire.

Mr. Getz’s reasons for withholding the letter from his daughter and burning it were several.  In the first place, Fairchilds was “an UNbeliever,” and therefore his influence was baneful; he was Jacob Getz’s enemy, and therefore no fit person to be writing friendly letters to his daughter; he asked Tillie, in his letter, to write to him, and this would involve the buying of stationery and wasting of time that might be better spent; and finally, he and Tillie, as he painfully gathered from the letter, were “making up” to a degree that might end in her wanting to marry the fellow.

Mr. Getz meant to tell Tillie that he had received this letter; but somehow, every time he opened his lips to speak the words, the memory of her wild-cat behavior in defense of the teacher that afternoon in the woods, and her horribly death-like appearance when she had lain unconscious in the teacher’s arms, recurred to him with a vividness that effectually checked him, and eventually led him to decide that it were best not to risk another such outbreak.  So she remained in ignorance of the fact that Fairchilds had again written to her.

Carlyle’s “Gospel of Work” was indeed Tillie’s salvation in these days; for in spite of her restless yearning and loneliness, she was deeply interested and even fascinated with her teaching, and greatly pleased and encouraged with her success in it.

At last, with the end of her first month at William Penn, came the rather dreaded “pay-day”; for she knew that it would mean the hardest battle of her life.

The forty dollars was handed to her in her schoolroom on Friday afternoon, at the close of the session.  It seemed untold wealth to Tillie, who never before in her life had owned a dollar.

She’ did not risk carrying it all home with her.  The larger part of the sum she intrusted to the doctor to deposit for her in a Lancaster bank.

When, at five o’clock, she reached home and walked into the kitchen, her father’s eagerness for her return, that he might lay his itching palms on her earnings, was perfectly manifest to her in his unduly affectionate, “Well, Tillie!”

She was pale, but outwardly composed.  It was to be one of those supreme crises in life which one is apt to meet with a courage and a serenity that are not forthcoming in the smaller irritations and trials of daily experience.