Miss Chandler took a liking to the tall girl who had come so far to sit under her instruction.  There was a fine, free air in her bearing, a lightness in her step, a sparkle in her eye, that spoke of good blood,—­whether fused by nature in its own alembic, out of material despised and spurned of men, or whether some obscure ancestral strain, the teacher could not tell.  The girl proved intelligent and learned rapidly, indeed seemed almost feverishly anxious to learn.  She was quiet, and was, though utterly untrained, instinctively polite, and profited from the first day by the example of her teacher’s quiet elegance.  The teacher dressed in simple black.  When Cicely came back to school the second day, she had left off her glass beads and her red ribbon, and had arranged her hair as nearly like the teacher’s as her skill and its quality would permit.

The teacher was touched by these efforts at imitation, and by the intense devotion Cicely soon manifested toward her.  It was not a sycophantic, troublesome devotion, that made itself a burden to its object.  It found expression in little things done rather than in any words the girl said.  To the degree that the attraction was mutual, Martha recognized in it a sort of freemasonry of temperament that drew them together in spite of the differences between them.  Martha felt sometimes, in the vague way that one speculates about the impossible, that if she were brown, and had been brought up in North Carolina, she would be like Cicely; and that if Cicely’s ancestors had come over in the Mayflower, and Cicely had been reared on Beacon Street, in the shadow of the State House dome, Cicely would have been very much like herself.

Miss Chandler was lonely sometimes.  Her duties kept her occupied all day.  On Sundays she taught a Bible class in the schoolroom.  Correspondence with bureau officials and friends at home furnished her with additional occupation.  At times, nevertheless, she felt a longing for the company of women of her own race; but the white ladies of the town did not call, even in the most formal way, upon the Yankee school-teacher.  Miss Chandler was therefore fain to do the best she could with such companionship as was available.  She took Cicely to her home occasionally, and asked her once to stay all night.  Thinking, however, that she detected a reluctance on the girl’s part to remain away from home, she did not repeat her invitation.

Cicely, indeed, was filling a double role.  The learning acquired from Miss Chandler she imparted to John at home.  Every evening, by the light of the pine-knots blazing on Needham’s ample hearth, she taught John to read the simple words she had learned during the day.  Why she did not take him to school she had never asked herself; there were several other pupils as old as he seemed to be.  Perhaps she still thought it necessary to protect him from curious remark.  He worked with Needham by day, and she could see him at night, and all of