“How I wish you had to do neither!” sighed Johanna, looking fondly at the bright face and light little figure that was flitting about putting the school-room to rights before the pupils came in.

“Nonsense—­I don’t wish any such thing.  Doing it makes me not a whit less charming and lovely.”  She often applied these adjectives to herself, with the most perfect conviction that she was uttering a fiction patent to every body.  I must be very juvenile also, for I’m certain the fellow-passenger at the station to-day took me for Ascott’s sweetheart.  When we were saying good by an old gentleman who sat next him was particularly sympathetic, and you should have seen how indignantly Ascott replied, “It’s only my aunt!”

Miss Leaf laughed, and the shadow vanished from her face, as Hilary had meant it should.  She only said, caressing her, “Well, my pet, never mind.  I hope you will have a real sweetheart some day.”

“I’m in no hurry, thank you, Johanna.”

But now was heard the knock after knock of the little boys and girls, and there began that monotonous daily round of school labor, rising from the simplicities of c, a, t, cat, and d, o, g, dog—­to the sublime heights of Pinnock and Lennie, Telemaque and Latin Delectus.  No loftier; Stowbury being well supplied with first class schools, and having a vague impression that the Misses Leaf, born ladies and not brought up as governesses, were not competent educators except of very small children.

Which was true enough until lately.  So Miss Leaf kept contentedly to the c, a, t, cat, and d, o, g, dog, of the little butchers and bakers, as Miss Selina, who taught only sewing, and came into the school-room but little during the day, scornfully termed them.  The higher branches such as they were, she left gradually to Hilary, who, of late, possibly out of sympathy with a friend of hers, had begun to show an actual gift for teaching school.

It is a gift—­all will allow; and chiefly those who have it not, among which was poor Johanna Leaf.  The admiring envy with which she watched Hilary, moving briskly about from class to class, with a word of praise to one and rebuke to another, keeping every one’s attention alive, spurring on the dull, controlling the unruly, and exercising over every member in this little world that influence, at once the strongest and most intangible and inexplicable—­personal influence—­was only equaled by the way in which, at pauses in the day’s work, when it grew dull and monotonous or when the stupidity of the children ruffled her own quick temper beyond endurance, Hilary watched Johanna.

The time I am telling of now is long ago.