“Old things can rot!” Walter answered.

“And you fancy,” the bishop indignantly demanded, “that I will give one dollar for your support while you are adhering to this blasphemy?  That I will ever again even so much as break bread with you, until, in humble contrition, you return to your allegiance to the Church?”

Walter lifted his earnest eyes and met squarely his uncle’s frowning stare.  Then the boy rose.

“Nothing, then, is left for me,” he said steadily, “but to leave your home, give up the course of study I had hoped to continue at Harvard, and get to work.”

“You fully realize all that this step must mean?” his uncle coldly asked him.  “You are absolutely penniless.”

“In a matter of this kind, uncle, you must realize that such a consideration could not possibly enter in.”

“You have not a penny of your own.  The few thousands that your father left were long ago used up in your school-bills.”

“And I am much in your debt; I know it all.”

“So you choose poverty and hardship for the sake of this perversity?”

“Others have suffered harder things for principle.”

Thus they parted.

And thus it was, through the suddenness and unexpectedness of the loss of his home and livelihood, that Walter Fairchilds came to apply for the position at William Penn.

“Here, Tillie, you take and go up to Sister Jennie Hershey’s and get some mush.  I’m makin’ fried mush fur supper,” said Aunty Em, bustling into the hotel kitchen where her niece was paring potatoes, one Saturday afternoon.  “Here’s a quarter.  Get two pound.”

“Oh, Tillie,” called her cousin Rebecca from the adjoining dining-room, which served also as the family sitting-room, “hurry on and you’ll mebbe be in time to see the stage come in with the new teacher in.  Mebbe you’ll see him to speak to yet up at Hershey’s.”

“Lizzie Hershey’s that wonderful tickled that the teacher’s going to board at their place!” said Amanda, the second daughter, a girl of Tillie’s age, as she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Tillie put on her black hood over the white Mennonite cap.  Stout Aunty Em also wore the Mennonite dress, which lent a certain dignity to her round face with its alert but kindly eyes; but her two daughters were still “of the world’s people.”

“When Lizzie she tole me about it, comin’ out from Lancaster after market this morning,” continued Amanda, “she was now that tickled!  She sayed he’s such a good-looker!  Och, I wisht he was stoppin’ here; ain’t, Tillie?  Lizzie’ll think herself much, havin’ a town fellah stoppin’ at their place.”

“If he’s stoppin’ at Hershey’s,” said Rebecca, appearing suddenly, “that ain’t sayin’ he has to get in with Lizzie so wonderful thick!  I hope he’s a Jolly fellah.”

Amanda and Rebecca were now girls of seventeen and eighteen years —­buxom, rosy, absolutely unideal country lasses.  Beside them, frail little Tillie seemed a creature of another clay.