“Lizzie tole me:  she sayed how he come up to their market-stall in there at Lancaster this morning,” Amanda related, “and tole her he’d heard Jonas Hershey’s pork-stall at market was where he could mebbe find out a place he could board at in New Canaan with a private family—­he’d sooner live with a private family that way than at the HOtel.  Well, Lizzie she coaxed her pop right there in front of the teacher to say THEY’d take him, and Jonas Hershey he sayed he didn’t care any.  So Lizzie she tole him then he could come to their place, and he sayed he’d be out this after in the four-o’clock stage.”

“Well, and I wonder what her mother has to say to her and Jonas fixin’ it up between ’em to take a boarder and not waitin’ to ast her!” Aunty Em said.  “I guess mebbe Sister Jennie’s spited!”

The appellation of “sister” indicated no other relation than that of the Mennonite church membership, Mrs. Jonas Hershey being also a New Mennonite.

“Now don’t think you have to run all the way there and back, Tillie,” was her aunt’s parting injunction. “I don’t time you like what your pop does!  Well, I guess not!  I take notice you’re always out of breath when you come back from an urrand.  It’s early yet—­you dare stop awhile and talk to Lizzie.”

Tillie gave her aunt a look of grateful affection as she left the house.  Often when she longed to thank her for her many little acts of kindness, the words would not come.  It was the habit of her life to repress every emotion of her mind, whether of bitterness or pleasure, and an unconquerable shyness seized upon her in any least attempt to reveal herself to those who were good to her.

It was four o’clock on a beautiful October afternoon as she walked up the village street, and while she enjoyed, through all her sensitive maiden soul, the sweet sunshine and soft autumn coloring, her thought dwelt with a pleasant expectancy on her almost inevitable meeting with “the Teacher,” if he did indeed arrive in the stage now due at New Canaan.

Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie Hershey, Tillie’s eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a feminine hunger for romance.  Life as yet had not revealed those emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss Margaret—­which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment.  It was only because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to become “educated” that she was interested in his coming.

It was but a few minutes’ walk to the home of Jonas Hershey, the country pork butcher.  As Tillie turned in at the gate, she heard, with a leap of her heart, the distant rumble of the approaching stagecoach.