contrast with poor Mliss in all this praise of Clytie. Secondly, there
was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Mrs.
Morpher's earliest born. So that the master, after a few futile
efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another
engagement, and left without asking the information required, but in his
after reflections somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley the
full benefit of having refused it.

Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil once more in the close
communion of old. The child seemed to notice the change in the master's
manner, which had of late been constrained, and in one of their long
postprandial walks she stopped suddenly, and mounting a stump, looked
full in his face with big, searching eyes. "You ain't mad?" said she,
with an interrogative shake of the black braids. "No." "Nor bothered?"
"No." "Nor hungry?" (Hunger was to Mliss a sickness that might attack
a person at any moment.) "No." "Nor thinking of her?" "Of whom, Lissy?"
"That white girl." (This was the latest epithet invented by Mliss, who
was a very dark brunette, to express Clytemnestra.) "No." "Upon your
word?" (A substitute for "Hope you'll die!" proposed by the master.)
"Yes." "And sacred honor?" "Yes." Then Mliss gave him a fierce little
kiss, and, hopping down, fluttered off. For two or three days after
that she condescended to appear more like other children, and be, as she
expressed it, "good."

Two years had passed since the master's advent at Smith's Pocket, and as
his salary was not large, and the prospects of Smith's Pocket eventually
becoming the capital of the State not entirely definite, he contemplated
a change. He had informed the school trustees privately of his
intentions, but educated young men of unblemished moral character being
scarce at that time, he consented to continue his school term through