“That will be as she says.  How is it, Miss Tillie?  Do you want him to go?”

Now Tillie knew that if she allowed Absalom Puntz to leave her in his present state of baffled anger, Fairchilds would not remain in New Canaan a month.  Absalom was his father’s only child, and Nathaniel Puntz was known to be both suspicious and vindictive.  “Clothed in a little brief authority,” as school director, he never missed an opportunity to wield his precious power.

With quick insight, Tillie realized that the teacher would think meanly of her if, after her outcry at Absalom’s amorous benavior, she now inconsistently ask that he remain with her for the rest of the evening.  But what the teacher might think about her did not matter so much as that he should be saved from the wrath of Absalom.

“Please leave him stay,” she answered in a low voice.

Fairchilds gazed in surprise upon the girl’s sweet, troubled face.  “Let him stay?”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps my interference was unwelcome?”

“I thank you, but—­I want him to stay.”

“Yes?  I beg pardon for my intrusion.  Good night.”

He turned away somewhat abruptly and left the room.

And Tillie was again alone with Absalom.

In his chamber, getting ready for bed, Fairchilds’s thoughts idly dwelt upon the strange contradictions he seemed to see in the character of the little Mennonite maiden.  He had thought that he recognized in her a difference from the rest of this household—­a difference in speech, in feature, in countenance, in her whole personality.  And yet she could allow the amorous attentions of that coarse, stupid cub; and her protestations against the fellow’s liberties with her had been mere coquetry.  Well, he would be careful, another time, how he played the part of a Don Quixote.

Meantime Tillie, with suddenly developed histrionic skill, was, by a Spartan self-sacrifice in submitting to Absalom’s love-making, overcoming his wrath against the teacher.  Absalom never suspected how he was being played upon, or what a mere tool he was in the hands of this gentle little girl, when, somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself half promising that the teacher should not be complained of to his father.  The infinite tact and scheming it required on Tillie’s part to elicit this assurance without further arousing his jealousy left her, at the end of his prolonged sitting-up, utterly exhausted.

Yet when at last her weary head found her pillow, it was not to rest or sleep.  A haunting, fearful certainty possessed her.  “Dumm” as he was, Absalom, in his invulnerable persistency, had become to the tired, tortured girl simply an irresistible force of Nature.  And Tillie felt that, struggle as she might against him, there would come a day when she could fight no longer, and so at last she must fall a victim to this incarnation of Dutch determination.