“Miss Margaret!” Tillie breathed, gazing up at her, her eyes wide and strained with distress, “if you go away and get married, won’t I never see you no more?”

“But, dear, I shall live so near—­at the Normal School only a few miles away.  You can come to see me often.”

“But pop won’t leave me, Miss Margaret—­it costs too expensive to go wisiting, and I got to help with the work, still.  O Miss Margaret!” Tillie sobbed, as Margaret sat down and held the clinging child to her, “I’ll never see you no more after you go away!”

“Tillie, dear!” Margaret tried to soothe her.  “I ’ll come to see you, then, if you can’t come to see me.  Listen, Tillie,—­I’ve just thought of something.”

Suddenly she put the little girl from her and stood up.

“Let me take Tillie to live with me next fall at the Normal School.  Won’t you do that, Mr. Getz!” she urged him.  “She could go to the preparatory school, and if we stay at Millersville, Dr. Lansing and I would try to have her go through the Normal School and graduate.  Will you consent to it, Mr. Getz?”

“And who’d be payin’ fur all this here?” Mr. Getz ironically inquired.

“Tillie could earn her own way as my little maid—­helping me keep my few rooms in the Normal School building and doing my mending and darning for me.  And you know after she was graduated she could earn her living as a teacher.”

Margaret saw the look of feverish eagerness with which Tillie heard this proposal and awaited the outcome.

Before her husband could answer, Mrs. Getz offered a weak protest.

“I hear the girls hired in town have to set away back in the kitchen and never dare set front—­always away back, still.  Tillie wouldn’t like that.  Nobody would.”

“But I shall live in a small suite of rooms at the school—­a library, a bedroom, a bath-room, and a small room next to mine that can be Tillie’s bedroom.  We shall take our meals in the school dining-room.”

“Well, that mebbe she wouldn’t mind.  But ’way back she wouldn’t be satisfied to set.  That’s why the country girls don’t like to hire in town, because they dassent set front with the missus.  Here last market-day Sophy Haberbush she conceited she’d like oncet to hire out in town, and she ast me would I go with her after market to see a lady that advertised in the newspaper fur a girl, and I sayed no, I wouldn’t mind.  So I went along.  But Sophy she wouldn’t take the place fur all.  She ast the lady could she have her country company, Sundays—­he was her company fur four years now and she wouldn’t like to give him up neither.  She tole the lady her company goes, still, as early as eleven.  But the lady sayed her house must be darkened and locked at half-past ten a’ready.  She ast me was I Sophy’s mother and I sayed no, I’m nothin’ to her but a neighbor woman.  And she tole Sophy, when they eat, still, Sophy she couldn’t eat along.  I guess she thought Sophy Haberbush wasn’t