She pressed her lips to Tillie’s in a long kiss, while the child clung to her in passionate devotion.  Mr. Getz looked on with dull bewilderment.  He knew, in a vague way, that every word the teacher spoke to the child, no less than those useless caresses, was “siding along with the scholar ag’in’ the parent,” and yet he could not definitely have stated just how.  He was quite sure that she would not dare so to defy him did she not know that she had the whip-handle in the fact that she did not want her “job” next year, and that the Board could not, except for definite offenses, break their contract with her.  It was only in view of these considerations that she played her game of “plaguing” him by championing Tillie.  Jacob Getz was incapable of recognizing in the teacher’s attitude toward his child an unselfish interest and love.

So, in dogged, sullen silence, he saw this extraordinary young woman take her leave and pass out of his house.

IX

“I’ll do my darn best, teacher!”

It soon “got put out” in New Canaan that Miss Margaret was “promised,” and the doctor was surprised to find how much the news depressed him.

“I didn’t know, now, how much I was stuck on her!  To think I can’t have her even if I do want her” (up to this time he had had moments now and then of not feeling absolutely sure of his inclination), “and that she’s promised to one of them tony Millersville Normal professors!  If it don’t beat all!  Well,” he drew a long, deep sigh as, lounging back in his buggy, he let his horse jog at his own gait along the muddy country road, “I jus’ don’t feel fur nothin’ to-day.  She was now certainly a sweet lady,” he thought pensively, as though alluding to one who had died.  “If there’s one sek I do now like, it’s the female—­and she was certainly a nice party!”

In the course of her career at William Penn, Miss Margaret had developed such a genuine fondness for the shaggy, good-natured, generous, and unscrupulous little doctor, that before she abandoned her post at the end of the term, and shook the dust of New Canaan from her feet, she took him into her confidence and begged him to take care of Tillie.

“She is an uncommon child, doctor, and she must—­I am determined that she must—­be rescued from the life to which that father of hers would condemn her.  You must help me to bring it about.”

“Nothin’ I like better, Teacher, than gettin’ ahead of Jake Getz,” the doctor readily agreed.  “Or obligin’ you.  To tell you the truth,—­and it don’t do no harm to say it now,—­if you hadn’t been promised, I was a-goin’ to ast you myself!  You took notice I gave you an inwitation there last week to go buggy-ridin’ with me.  That was leadin’ up to it.  After that Sunday night you left me set up with you, I never conceited you was promised a’ready to somebody else—­and you even left me set with my feet on your chair-rounds!” The doctor’s tone was a bit injured.