The office of guardian was not one of great tasks or of many duties, though the child’s aunt had insisted upon making an allowance for her of a hundred dollars a year, and this was duly acknowledged and placed to its owner’s credit in the savings bank of the next town.  Her grandmother Thacher always refused to spend it, saying proudly that she had never been beholden to Miss Prince and she never meant to be, and while she lived the aunt and niece should be kept apart.  She would not say that her daughter had never been at fault, but it was through the Princes all the trouble of her life had come.

Dr. Leslie was mindful of his responsibilities, and knew more of his ward than was ever suspected.  He was eager that the best district school teacher who could be found should be procured for the Thacher and Dyer neighborhood, and in many ways he took pains that the little girl should have all good things that were possible.  He only laughed when her grandmother complained that Nan would not be driven to school, much less persuaded, and that she was playing in the brook, or scampering over the pastures when she should be doing other things.  Mrs. Thacher, perhaps unconsciously, had looked for some trace of the father’s good breeding and gentlefolk fashions, but this was not a child who took kindly to needlework and pretty clothes.  She was fearlessly friendly with every one; she did not seem confused even when the minister came to make his yearly parochial visitation, and as for the doctor, he might have been her own age, for all humility she thought it necessary to show in the presence of this chief among her elders and betters.  Old Mrs. Thacher gave little pulls at her granddaughter’s sleeves when she kept turning to see the doctor in sermon-time, but she never knew how glad he was, or how willingly he smiled when he felt the child’s eyes watching him as a dog’s might have done, forcing him to forget the preaching altogether and to attend to this dumb request for sympathy.  One blessed day Dr. Leslie had waited in the church porch and gravely taken the child’s hand as she came out; and said that he should like to take her home with him; he was going to the lower part of the town late in the afternoon and would leave her then at the farm-house.

“I was going to ask you for something for her shoulder,” said Grandmother Thacher, much pleased, “she’ll tell you about it, it was a fall she had out of an apple-tree,”—­and Nan looked up with not a little apprehension, but presently tucked her small hand inside the doctor’s and was more than ready to go with him.  “I thought she looked a little pale,” the doctor said, to which Mrs. Thacher answered that it was a merciful Providence who had kept the child from breaking her neck, and then, being at the foot of the church steps, they separated.  It had been a great trial to the good woman to give up the afternoon service, but she was growing old, as she told herself often in those days, and felt, as she certainly looked, greatly older than her years.