“No use, Tillie,” the doctor would report in discouragement, week after week; “we’re up against it sure this time!  You’re losin’ William Penn till next month, or I’ll eat my hat!  A body might as well try to eat his hat as move them pig-headed Dutch once they get sot.  And they’re sot on puttin’ you out, all right!  You see, your pop and Nathaniel Puntz they just fixed ’em!  Me and you ain’t got no show at all.”

Tillie could think of no way of escape from her desperate position.  What was there before her but a return to the farm, or perhaps, at best, marriage with Absalom?

“To be sure, I should have to be reduced to utter indifference to my fate if I ever consented to marry Absalom,” she bitterly told herself.  “But when it is a question between doing that and living at home, I don’t know but I might be driven to it!”

At times, the realization that there was no possible appeal from her situation did almost drive her to a frenzy.  After so many years of struggle, just as she was tasting success, to lose all the fruits of her labor—­how could she endure it?  With the work she loved taken away from her, how could she bear the gnawing hunger at her heart for the presence of him unto whom was every thought of her brain and every throbbing pulse of her soul?  The future seemed to stretch before her, a terrible, an unendurable blank.

The first week of April was the time fixed for the meeting of the Board at which she was to be “chased off her job”; and as the fatal day drew near, a sort of lethargy settled upon her, and she ceased to straggle, even in spirit, against the inevitable.

“Well, Tillie,” the doctor said, with a long sigh, as he came into the store at six o’clock on the eventful evening, and leaned over the counter to talk to the girl, “they’re all conwened by now, over there in the hotel parlor.  Your pop and Nathaniel Puntz they’re lookin’ wonderful important.  Tour pop,” he vindictively added, “is just chucklin’ at the idea of gettin’ you home under his thumb ag’in!”

Tillie did not speak.  She sat behind the counter, her cheeks resting on the backs of her hands, her wistful eyes gazing past the doctor toward the red light in the hotel windows across the way.

“Golly! but I’d of liked to beat ’em out on this here game!  But they’ve got us, Tillie!  They’ll be wotin’ you out of your job any minute now.  And then your pop’ll be comin’ over here to fetch you along home!  Oh!  If he wasn’t your pop I c’d say somethin’ real perfane about him.”

Tillie drew a long breath; but she did not speak.  She could not.  It seemed to her that she had come to the end of everything.

“Look-ahere, Tillie,” the doctor spoke suddenly, “you just up and get ahead of ’em all—­you just take yourself over to the Millersville Normal!  You’ve got some money saved, ain’t you?”

“Yes!” A ray of hope kindled in her eyes.  “I have saved one hundred and twenty-five dollars!  I should have more than that if I had not returned to the world’s dress.”