“We darsent go too fur,” warned Aunty Em, “or he won’t leave her stay with us at all.”

“Now there’s you, Abe,” remarked the doctor, dryly; “from the time your childern could walk and talk a’ready all you had to say was ’Go’—­and they stayed.  Ain’t?”

Mr. Wackernagel joined in the loud laughter of his wife and daughters.

Tillie realized that the teacher, as he sipped his coffee, was listening to the dialogue with astonishment and curiosity, and she hungered to know all that was passing through his mind.

Her second temptation came to her upon hearing Fairchilds, as they rose from the breakfast-table, suggest a walk in the woods with Amanda and Rebecca.  “And won’t Miss Tillie go too?” he inquired.

Her aunt answered for her.  “Och, she wouldn’t have dare, her bein’ a member, you know.  It would be breakin’ the Sabbath.  And anyways, even if it wasn’t Sunday, us New Mennonites don’t take walks or do anything just fur pleasure when they ain’t nothin’ useful in it.  If Tillie went, I’d have to report her to the meetin’, even if it did go ag’in’ me to do it.”

“And then what would happen?” Mr. Fairchilds inquired curiously.

“She’d be set back.”

“’Set back’?”

“She wouldn’t have dare to greet the sisters with a kiss, and she couldn’t speak with me or eat with me or any of the brothers and sisters till she gave herself up ag’in and obeyed to the rules.”

“This is very interesting,” commented Fairchilds, his contemplative gaze moving from the face of Mrs. Wackernagel to Tillie.  “But,” he questioned, “Mrs. Wackernagel, why are your daughters allowed to do what you think wrong and would not do?”

“Well,” began Aunty Em, entering with relish into the discussion, for she was strong in theology, “we don’t hold to forcin’ our childern or interferin’ with the free work of the Holy Spirit in bringin’ souls to the truth.  We don’t do like them fashionable churches of the world where teaches their childern to say their prayers and makes ’em read the Bible and go to Sunday-school.  We don’t uphold to Sunday-schools.  You can’t read nothin’ in the Scripture about Sunday-schools.  We hold everybody must come by their free will, and learnt only of the Holy Spirit, into the light of the One True Way.”

Fairchilds gravely thanked her for her explanation and pursued the subject no further.

When Tillie presently saw him start out with her cousins, an unregenerate longing filled her soul to stay away from meeting and go with them, to spend this holy Sabbath day in worshiping, not her God, but this most god-like being who had come like the opening up of heaven into her simple, uneventful life.  In her struggle with her conscience to crush such sinful desires, Tillie felt that now, for the first time, she understood how Jacob of old had wrestled with the Angel.