“No, you can’t go to school to-morrow, Tillie,” her father said, “even if you’re some better; I’m keepin’ you home to lay still one day anyhow.”

“But I don’t want to stay home!” the child exclaimed, casting off the shawl with which her father had covered her and throwing out her arms.  “I want to go to school!  I want to, pop!” she sobbed, almost screaming.  “I want to go to Miss Margaret!  I will, I will!”

“Tillie—­Tillie!” her father soothed her in that unwonted tone of gentleness that sounded so strange to her.  His face had turned pale at her outcries, delirious they seemed to him, coming from his usually meek and submissive child.  “There now,” he said, drawing the cover over her again; “now lay still and be a good girl, ain’t you will?”

“Will you leave me go to school to-morrow?” she pleaded piteously.  “Dare I go to school to-morrow?”

“No, you dassent, Tillie.  But if you’re a good girl, mebbe I ’ll leave Sammy ast Teacher to come to see you after school.”

“Oh, pop!” breathed the child ecstatically, as in supreme contentment she sank back again on her pillow.  “I wonder will she come?  Do you think she will come to see me, mebbe?”

“To be sure will she.”

“Now think,” said the doctor, “how much she sets store by Teacher!  And a lot of ’em’s the same way—­girls and boys.”

“I didn’t know she was so much fur Teacher,” said Mr. Getz.  “She never spoke nothin’.”

“She never spoke nothin’ to me about it neither,” said Mrs. Getz.

“Well, I ’ll give you all good-by, then,” said the doctor; and he went away.

On his slow journey home through the mud he mused on the inevitable clash which he foresaw must some day come between the warm-hearted teacher (whom little Tillie so loved, and who so injudiciously lent her “novel-books”) and the stern and influential school director, Jacob Getz.

“There my chanct comes in,” thought the doctor; “there’s where I mebbe put in my jaw and pop the question—­just when Jake Getz is makin’ her trouble and she’s gettin’ chased off her job.  I passed my word I’d stand by her, and, by gum, I ’ll do it!  When she’s out of a job—­that’s the time she ’ll be dead easy!  Ain’t?  She’s the most allurin’ female I seen since my wife up’t and died fur me!”

VI

JAKE GETZ IN A QUANDARY

Tillie’s illness, though severe while it lasted, proved to be a matter of only a few days’ confinement to bed; and fortunately for her, it was while she was still too weak and ill to be called to account for her misdeed that her father discovered her deception as to the owner of “Ivanhoe.”  At least he found out, in talking with Elviny Dinkleberger and her father at the Lancaster market, that the girl was innocent of ever having owned or even seen the book, and that, consequently, she had of course never lent it either to Rebecca Wackernagel at the hotel or to Tillie.