Mrs. Waekernagel looked blank.  “Tillie!” she appealed to her niece, who had shyly stepped half behind her, “do you know right what he means?”

Tillie dumbly shook her head.

“Pesky Louzy!” Mrs. Waekernagel experimented with the unfamiliar name.  “Don’t it, now, beat all!  It’ll take me awhile till I’m used to that a’ready.  Mebbe I’ll just call you Teacher; ain’t?”

She looked at him inquiringly, expecting an answer.  “Ain’t!” she repeated in her vigorous, whole-souled way.

“Eh—­ain’t what?” Fairchilds asked, puzzled.

“Och, I just mean, say not?  Can’t you mebbe talk English wery good?  We had such a foreigners at this HOtel a’ready.  We had oncet one, he was from Phil’delphy and he didn’t know what we meant right when we sayed, ‘The butter’s all any more.’  He’d ast like you, ‘All what?’ Yes, he was that dumm!  Och, well,” she added consolingly, “people can’t help fur their dispositions, that way!”

“And what must I call you?” the young man inquired.

“My name’s Wackernagel.”

“Miss or Mrs.?”

“Well, I guess not Miss anyhow!  I’m the mother of four!”

“Oh, excuse me!”

“Oh, that’s all right!” responded Mrs. Wackernagel, amiably.  “Well, I must go make supper now.  You just make yourself at home that way.”

“May I go to my room?”

“Now?” asked Mrs. Wackernagel, incredulously.  “Before night?”

“To unpack my dress-suit case,” the young man explained.  “My trunk will be brought out to-morrow on the stage.”

“All right.  If you want.  But we ain’t used to goin’ up-stairs in the daytime.  Tillie, you take his satchel and show him up.  This is my niece, Tillie Getz.”

Again Mr. Fairchilds bowed to the girl as his eyes rested on the fair face looking out from her white cap.  Tillie bent her head in response, then stooped to pick up the suit case.  But he interposed and took it from her hands—­and the touch of chivalry in the act went to her head like wine.

She led the way up-stairs to the close, musty, best spare bedroom.

XV

THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME

At the supper-table, the apparently inexhaustible topic of talk was the refusal of the Hersheys to receive the new teacher into the bosom of their family.  A return to this theme again and again, on the part of the various members of the Wackernagel household, did not seem to lessen its interest for them, though the teacher himself did not take a very animated part in its discussion.  Tillie realized, as with an absorbing interest she watched his fine face, that all he saw and heard here was as novel to him as the world whence he had come would be to her and her kindred and neighbors, could they be suddenly transplanted into it.  Tillie had never looked upon any human countenance which seemed to express so much of that ideal world in which she lived her real life.