Cynthia, as she went out of the door, wondered what they would talk about.  Then she turned toward the school.  It was not the March wind that burned her cheeks; as she thought of the mass meeting the night before, which was all about her, she wished she might go to school that morning through the woods and pasture lots rather than down Brampton Street.  What—­what would Bob say when he heard of the meeting?  Would he come again to Brampton?  If he did, she would run away to Boston with Miss Lucretia.  Every day it had been a trial to pass the Worthington house, but she could not cross the wide street to avoid it.  She hurried a little, unconsciously, when she came to it, for there was Mr. Worthington on the steps talking to Mr. Flint.  How he must hate her now, Cynthia reflected!  He did not so much as look up when she passed.

The other citizens whom she met made up for Mr. Worthington’s coldness, and gave her a hearty greeting, and some stopped to offer their congratulations.  Cynthia did not pause to philosophize:  she was learning to accept the world as it was, and hurried swiftly on to the little schoolhouse.  The children saw her coming, and ran to meet her and escorted her triumphantly in at the door.  Of their welcome she could be sure.  Thus she became again teacher of the lower school.

How the judge and Miss Lucretia got along that morning, Cynthia never knew.  Miss Lucretia spent the day in her old home, submitting to hero-worship, and attended an evening party in her honor at Mr. Gamaliel Ives’s house—­a mansion not so large as the first citizen’s, though it had two bay-windows and was not altogether unimposing.  The first citizen, needless to say, was not there, but the rest of the elite attended.  Mr. Ives will tell you all about the entertainment if you go to Brampton, but the real reason Miss Lucretia consented to go was to please Lucy Baird, who was Gamaliel’s wife, and to chat with certain old friends whom she had not seen.  The next morning she called at the school to bid Cynthia good-by, and to whisper something in her ear which made her very red before all the scholars.  She shook her head when Miss Lucretia said it, for it had to do with an incident in the 29th chapter of Genesis.

While Jonathan Hill was being made a hero of in the little two-by-four office of the feed store the morning after the mass meeting (though nobody offered to take over his mortgage), Mr. Dodd was complaining to his wife of shooting pains, and “callated” he would stay at home that day.

“Shootin’ fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Dodd.  “Get along down to the store and face the music, Levi Dodd.  You’d have had shootin’ pains if you’d a went to the meetin’.”

“I might stop by at Mr. Worthington’s house and explain how powerless I was—­”

“For goodness’ sake git out, Levi.  I guess he knows how powerless you are with your shootin’ pains.  If you only could forget Isaac D. Worthington for three minutes, you wouldn’t have ’em.”