Miss Prudence. Mrs. Nathaniel Conklin
Holmes had written to a friend that Marjorie West, his favorite among the girls, was "almost too sweet." He said to himself that he feared she "lacked character." Marjorie's quiet, observant father would have smiled at that and said nothing. The teacher said that she did not know how to take her own part. Marjorie had been eleven years in this grasping world and had not learned that she had any "part" to take.
Since her pencil had ceased scribbling the room was so still that a tiny mouse had been nibbling at the toe of her shoe. Just then as she raised her head and pinned her shawl more securely the door opened and something happened. The something happened in Marjorie's face. Hollis Rheid thought the sunset had burst across it. She did not exclaim, "Oh, I am so glad!" but the gladness was all in her eyes. If Marjorie had been more given to exclamations her eyes would not have been so expressive. The closed lips were a gain to the eyes and her friends missed nothing. The boy had learned her eyes by heart. How stoutly he would have resisted if some one had told him that years hence Marjorie's face would be a sealed volume to him.
But she was making her eyes and mouth to-day and years hence she made them, too. Perhaps he had something to do with it then as he certainly had something to do with it now.
"I came back with my sled to take you home. I gave Sam my last ten cents to do the night work for me. It was my turn, but he was willing enough. Where's your hood, Mousie? Any books to take?"
"Yes, my Geography and Arithmetic," she answered, taking her fleecy white hood from the seat behind her.
"Now you look like a sunbeam in a cloud," he said poetically as she tied it over her brown head. "Oh, ho!" turning to the blackboard, "you do make handsome figures. Got them all right, did you?"
"I knew how to do them, it was only that—I forgot."
"I don't think you'll forget again in a hurry. And that's a nice looking slate, too," he added, stepping nearer. "Mother said it was too much of a strain on your nervous system to write all that."
"I guess I haven't much of a nervous system," returned Marjorie, seriously; "the girls wrote the words they missed fifty times last Friday and he warned us about the one hundred to-day. I suppose it will be one hundred and fifty next Friday. I don't believe I'll ever miss again," she said, her lips trembling at the mention of it.
"I think I'll have a word or two to say to the master if you do. I wonder how Linnet would have taken it."
"She wouldn't have missed."
"I'll ask Mr. Holmes to put you over on the boys side if you miss next week," he cried mischievously, "and make you sit with us all the afternoon."
"I'd rather write each word five hundred times," she cried vehemently.
"I believe you would," he said good humoredly. "Never mind, Mousie, I know you won't miss again."
"I'll do my examples to-night and father will help me if I can't do them.
He used to teach in this very schoolhouse; he knows as much as Mr.
Holmes."
"Then he must be a Solomon," laughed the boy.
The stamp of Hollis' boots and the sound of his laughter had frightened the mouse back into its hiding-place in the chimney; Marjorie would not have frightened the mouse all day long.
The books were pushed into her satchel, her desk arranged in perfect order, her rubbers and red mittens drawn on, and she stood ready, satchel in hand, for her ride on the sled down the slippery hill where the boys and girls had coasted at noon and then she would ride on over the snowy road half a mile to the old, brown farmhouse. Her eyes were subdued a little, but the sunshine lingered all over her face. She knew Hollis would come.
He smiled down at her with his superior fifteen-year-old smile, she was such a wee mousie and always needed taking care of. If he could have a sister, he would want her to be like Marjorie. He was very much like Marjorie himself, just as shy, just as sensitive, hardly more fitted to take his own part, and I think Marjorie was the braver of the two. He was slow-tempered and unforgiving; if a friend failed him once, he never took him into confidence again. He was proud where Marjorie was humble. He gave his services; she gave herself. He seldom quarrelled, but never was the first to yield. They were both mixtures of reserve and frankness; both speaking as often out of a shut heart as an open heart. But when Marjorie could open her heart, oh, how she opened it! As for Hollis, I think he had never opened his; demonstrative sympathy was equally the key to the hearts of both.
But here I am analyzing them before they had learned they had any self to analyze. But they existed, all the same.
Marjorie was a plain little body while Hollis was noticeably handsome with eloquent brown eyes and hair with its golden, boyish beauty just shading into brown; his sensitive, mobile lips were prettier than any girl's, and there was no voice in school like his in tone or culture. Mr. Holmes was an elocutionist and had taken great pains with Hollis Rheid's voice. There was a courteous gentleness in his manner all his own; if knighthood meant purity, goodness, truth and manliness, then Hollis Rheid was a knightly school-boy. The youngest of five rough boys, with a stern, narrow-minded father and a mother who loved her boys with all her heart and yet for herself had no aims beyond kitchen and dairy, he had not learned his refinement at home; I think he had not learned it anywhere. Marjorie's mother insisted that Hollis Rheid must have had a praying grandmother away back somewhere. The master had written to his friend, Miss Prudence Pomeroy, that Hollis Rheid was a born gentleman, and had added with more justice and penetration than he had shown in reading Marjorie, "he has too little application and is too mischievous to become a real student. But I am not looking for geniuses in a country school. Marjorie and Hollis are bright enough for every purpose in life excepting to become leaders."
"Are you going to church, to-night?" Hollis inquired as she seated herself carefully on the sled.
"In the church?" she asked, bracing her feet and tucking the ends of her shawl around them.
"Yes; an evangelist is going to preach."
"Evangelist!" repeated Marjorie in a voice with a thrill in it.
"Don't you know what that is?" asked Hollis, harnessing himself into the sled.
"Oh, yes, indeed," said she. "I know about him and Christian."
Hollis looked perplexed; this must be one of Marjorie's queer ways of expressing something, and the strange preacher certainly had something to do with Christians.
"If it were not for the fractions I suppose I might go. I wish I wasn't stupid about Arithmetic."
"It's no matter if girls are stupid," he said consolingly. "Are you sure you are on tight? I'm going to run pretty soon. You won't have to earn your living by making figures."
"Shall you?" she inquired with some anxiety.
"Of course, I shall. Haven't I been three times through the Arithmetic and once through the Algebra that I may support myself and somebody else, sometime?"
This seemed very grand to child Marjorie who found fractions a very
Slough of Despond.
"I'm going to the city as soon as Uncle Jack finds a place for me. I expect a letter from him every night."
"Perhaps it will come to-night," said Marjorie, not very hopefully.
"I hope it will. And so this may be your last ride on Flyaway. Enjoy it all you can, Mousie."
Marjorie enjoyed everything all she could.
"Now, hurrah!" he shouted, starting on a quick run down the hill. "I'm going to turn you over into the brook."
Marjorie laughed her joyous little laugh. "I'm not afraid," she said in absolute content.
"You'd better be!" he retorted in his most savage tone.
The whole west was now in a glow and the glorious light stretched across fields of snow.
"Oh, how splendid,"