It was late and he was tired, for there had been a special meeting of the school board to deal with a matter connected with the new addition to the school building, and also to arrange to supply the place of a teacher who had suddenly decided to get married instead of continuing to teach. There had been much discussion about both matters and he had been greatly annoyed at the prospect of one young woman who had been suggested to fill the vacancy. She was of the so-called flapper variety and seemed to him to have no idea of serious work. She had been in his classes for the last six weeks, and he became more disgusted with her every time he saw her. The idea of her as[28] a colleague was not pleasant. He settled to his papers with a frown that portended no good to the poor victims whose fate he was settling by the marks of his blue pencil.

[28]

He marched through the papers, paragraph after paragraph, question after question, marking them ruthlessly. Misspelled words, how they got on his nerves! He drew sharp blue lines like little swords through them, and wrote caustic foot-notes on the corners of the pages. The young aspirants for graduation who received them in the morning would quiver when they read them and gather in groups to cast anathemas at him.

But suddenly he came to a paper written in a clear, firm hand as if the owner knew what she was talking about and thought it really worth writing down. The first sentence caught his interest because of the original way in which the statement was made. Here was a young philosopher who had really thought about life, and was taking the examination as something of interest in itself, rather than a terrible ordeal that must be gone through with for future advantage. As he read a vision of a clear smooth brow, calm eyes lifted now and then to the blackboard, gradually came back to his memory. He was sure this was the quiet young woman with the beautiful, sincere, unselfish face that he had noticed as he passed through the study hall that morning. There had been half a dozen strangers in from neighboring towns for examination. Only this one had attracted him. He had paused in the doorway watching her a moment while he waited for a book which the attending teacher was finding for him, and had marked the quiet grace of her demeanor, the earnest expression of her face, the pure regular features, the[29] soft outline of the brown waves of hair, the sweet, old-fashionedness of her, and wondered who she was. He had not been long in the town and did not know all the village maidens, yet it seemed as if she must be from another place, for certainly he could not have been in the same town with 

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