Tillie saw and felt this sudden change in him.  She lifted her free hand and laid it on his arm, her lips quivering.  “Father!” she half whispered.

She had never called him that before, and it seemed strangely to bring home to him what, in this crisis of his child’s life, was due to her from him, her only living parent.

Suddenly he released her shoulder and tossed away the strap.  “I see I wouldn’t be doin’ right to oppose you in this here, Tillie.  Well, I’m glad, fur all, that I ain’t whippin’ you.  It goes ag’in’ me to hit you since you was sick that time.  You’re gettin’ full big, too, to be punished that there way, fur all I always sayed still I’d never leave a child of mine get ahead of me, no matter how big they was, so long as they lived off of me.  But this here’s different.  You’re feelin’ conscientious about this here matter, and I ain’t hinderin’ you.”

To Tillie’s unspeakable amazement, he laid his hand on her head and held it there for an instant.  “Gawd bless you, my daughter, and help you to serve the Lord acceptable!”

So that crisis was past.

But Tillie knew, that night, as she rubbed witch-hazel on her sore shoulder, that a far worse struggle was before her.  In seeking to carry out the determination that burned in her heart to get an education, no aid could come to her as it had to-day, from her father’s sense of religious awe.  Would she be able, she wondered, to stand firm against his opposition when, a second time, it came to an issue between them?

XII

ABSALOM KEEPS COMPANY

Tillie wrote to Miss Margaret (she could not learn to call her Mrs. Lansing) how that she had “given herself up and turned plain,” and Miss Margaret, seeing how sacred this experience was to the young girl, treated the subject with all respect and even reverence.

The correspondence between these two, together with the books which from time to time came to the girl from her faithful friend, did more toward Tillie’s growth and development along lines of which her parents had no suspicion, than all the schooling at William Penn, under the instruction of the average “Millersville Normal,” could ever have accomplished.

And her tongue, though still very provincial, soon lost much of its native dialect, through her constant reading and study.

Of course whenever her father discovered her with her books he made her suffer.

“You’re got education enough a’ready,” he would insist.  “And too much fur your own good.  Look at me—­I was only educated with a Testament and a spelling-book and a slate.  We had no such a blackboards even, to recite on.  And do I look as if I need to know any more ’n what I know a’ready?”

Tillie bore her punishments like a martyr—­and continued surreptitiously to read and to study whenever and whatever she could; and not even the extreme conscientiousness of a New Mennonite faltered at this filial disobedience.  She obeyed her father implicitly, however tyrannical he was, to the point where he bade her suppress and kill all the best that God had given her of mind and heart.  Then she revolted; and she never for an instant doubted her entire justification in eluding or defying his authority.