“Oh, well, I’ll wriggle out somehow!  Trust to luck!” Fairchilds dismissed the subject, realizing the injudiciousness of being too confidential with this girl on so short an acquaintance.

At the momentous hour of seven, the directors promptly assembled.  When Tillie, at her aunt’s request, carried two kerosene lamps into the parlor, a sudden determination came to the girl to remain and witness the reception of the new teacher by the School Board.

She was almost sick with apprehension lest the Board should realize, as she did, that this Harvard graduate was too fine for such as they.  It was an austere Board, hard to satisfy, and there was nothing they would so quickly resent and reject as evident superiority in an applicant.  The Normal School students, their usual candidates, were for the most part, though not always, what was called in the neighborhood “nice and common.”  The New Canaan Board was certainly not accustomed to sitting in judgment upon an applicant such as this Pestalozzi Fairchilds. (Tillie’s religion forbade her to call him by the vain and worldly form of Mr.)

No one noticed the pale-faced girl as, after placing one lamp on the marble-topped table about which the directors sat and another on the mantelpiece, she moved quietly away to the farthest corner of the long, narrow parlor and seated herself back of the stove.

The applicant, too, when he came into the room, was too much taken up with what he realized to be the perils of his case to observe the little watcher in the corner, though he walked past her so close that his coat brushed her shoulder, sending along her nerves, like a faint electric shock, a sensation so novel and so exquisite that it made her suddenly close her eyes to steady her throbbing head.

There were present six members of the Board—­two Amishmen, one Old Mennonite, one patriarchal-looking Dunkard, one New Mennonite, and one Evangelical, the difference in their religious creeds being attested by their various costumes and the various cuts of beard and hair.  The Evangelical, the New Mennonite, and the Amishmen were farmers, the Dunkard kept the store and the post-office, and the Old Mennonite was the stage-driver.  Jacob Getz was the Evangelical; and Nathaniel Puntz, Absalom’s father, the New Mennonite.

The investigation of the applicant was opened up by the president of the Board, a long-haired Amishman, whose clothes were fastened by hooks and eyes instead of buttons and buttonholes, these latter being considered by his sect as a worldly vanity.

“What was your experience a’ready as a teacher?”

Fairchilds replied that he had never had any.

Tillie’s heart sank as, from her post in the corner, she heard this answer.  Would the members think for one moment of paying forty dollars a month to a teacher without experience?  She was sure they had never before done so.  They were shaking their heads gravely over it, she could see.