On her knees she passionately prayed to be delivered from the temptation of such unfaithfulness to her Lord, even in secret thought.  Yet even while in the very act of pleading for mercy, forgiveness, help, to her own unutterable horror she found herself wondering whether she would dare brave her father’s wrath and ask her aunt, in the morning, to keep back from her father a portion of her week’s wages that she might buy some new white caps, her old ones being of poor material and very worn.

It was a tenet of her church that “wearing-apparel was instituted by God as a necessity for the sake of propriety and also for healthful warmth, but when used for purposes of adornment it becomes the evidence of an un-Christlike spirit.”  Now Tillie knew that her present yearning for new caps was prompted, not by the praiseworthy and simple desire to be merely neat, but wholly by her vain longing to appear more fair in the eyes of the teacher.

Thus until the small hours of the morning did the young girl wrestle with the conflicting forces in her soul.

But the Enemy had it all his own way; for when Tillie went down-stairs next morning to help her aunt get breakfast, she knew that she intended this day to buy those new caps in spite of the inevitable penalty she would have to suffer for daring to use her own money without her father’s leave.

And when she walked into the kitchen, her aunt was amazed to see the girl’s fair face looking out from a halo of tender little brown curls, which, with a tortured conscience, and an apprehension of retribution at the hands of the meeting, Tillie had brushed from under her cap and arranged with artful care.

XIX

TILLIE TELLS A LIE

It was eleven o’clock on the following Saturday morning, a busy hour at the hotel, and Mrs. Wackernagel and Tillie were both hard at work in the kitchen, while Eebecca and Amanda were vigorously applying their young strength to “the up-stairs work.”

The teacher was lounging on the settee in the sitting-room, trying to read his Boston Transcript and divert his mind from its irritation and discontent under a condition of things which made it impossible for him to command Tillie’s time whenever he wanted a companion for a walk in the woods, or for a talk in which he might unburden himself of his pent-up thoughts and feelings.  The only freedom she had was in the evening; and even then she was not always at liberty.  There was Amanda always ready and at hand—­it kept him busy dodging her.  Why was Fate so perverse in her dealings with him?  Why couldn’t it be Tillie instead of Amanda?  Fairchilds chafed under this untoward condition of things like a fretful child—­or, rather, just like a man who can’t have what he wants.

Both Tillie and her aunt went about their tasks this morning with a nervousness of movement and an anxiety of countenance that told of something unwonted in the air.  Fairchilds was vaguely conscious of this as he sat in the adjoining room, with the door ajar.