Such sentiments and ideas were almost a foreign language to Tillie, and yet, intuitively, she understood the import of them.  In her loneliness, after Miss Margaret’s departure, she treasured and brooded over them day and night; and very much as the primitive Christian courted martyrdom, her mind dwelt, with ever-growing resolution, upon the thought of the heroic courage with which, in the years to come, she would surely obey them.

Miss Margaret had promised Tillie that she would write to her, and the child, overlooking the serious difficulties in the way, had eagerly promised in return, to answer her letters.

Once a week Mr. Getz called for mail at the village store, and Miss Margaret’s first letter was laboriously read by him on his way out to the farm.

He found it, on the whole, uninteresting, but he vaguely gathered from one or two sentences that the teacher, even at the distance of five miles, was still trying to “plague” him by “siding along with his child ag’in’ her parent.”

“See here oncet,” he said to Tillie, striding to the kitchen stove on his return home, the letter in his hand:  “this here goes after them novel-books, in the fire!  I ain’t leavin’ that there woman spoil you with no such letters like this here.  Now you know!”

The gleam of actual wickedness in Tillie’s usually soft eyes, as she saw that longed-for letter tossed into the flames, would have startled her father had he seen it.  The girl trembled from head to foot and turned a deathly white.

“I hate you, hate you, hate you!” her hot heart was saying as she literally glared at her tormentor.  “I’ll never forget this—­never, never; I’ll make you suffer for it—­I will, I will!”

But her white lips were dumb, and her impotent passion, having no other outlet, could only tear and bruise her own heart as all the long morning she worked in a blind fury at her household tasks.

But after dinner she did an unheard-of thing.  Without asking permission, or giving any explanation to either her father or her stepmother, she deliberately abandoned her usual Saturday afternoon work of cleaning up (she said to herself that she did not care if the house rotted), and dressing herself, she walked straight through the kitchen before her stepmother’s very eyes, and out of the house.

Her father was out in the fields when she undertook this high-handed step; and her mother was so dumb with amazement at such unusual behavior that she offered but a weak protest.

“What’ll pop say to your doin’ somepin like this here!” she called querulously after Tillie as she followed her across the kitchen to the door.  “He’ll whip you, Tillie; and here’s all the sweepin’ to be did—­”

There was a strange gleam in Tillie’s eyes before which the woman shrank and held her peace.  The girl swept past her, almost walked over several of the children sprawling on the porch, and went out of the gate and up the road toward the village.