bashfully and her soft hair falling over her face. One day I look up,
and six years have gone by,--as they go by in dreams,--and among the
scholars is a tall girl of sixteen, with serious, womanly eyes which I
cannot trust myself to look upon. The old life has come to an end. The
child has become a woman and can teach the master now. So help me
Heaven, I didn't know that I loved her until that day!

"Long after the children had gone home I sat in the schoolroom with my
face resting on my hands. There was her desk, the afternoon shadows
falling across it. It never looked empty and cheerless before. I went
and stood by the low chair, as I had stood hundreds of times. On the
desk was a pile of books, ready to be taken away, and among the rest a
small Latin grammar which we had studied together. What little despairs
and triumphs and happy hours were associated with it! I took it up
curiously, as if it were some gentle dead thing, and turned over the
pages, and could hardly see them. Turning the pages, idly so, I came to
a leaf on which something was written with ink, in the familiar girlish
hand. It was only the words 'Dear John,' through which she had drawn two
hasty pencil lines--I wish she hadn't drawn those lines!" added
Bladburn, under his breath.

He was silent for a minute or two, looking off towards the camps, where
the lights were fading out one by one.

"I had no right to go and love Mary. I was twice her age, an awkward,
unsocial man, that would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong as
wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her. I locked the grammar in my
desk and the secret in my heart for a year. I couldn't bear to meet her
in the village, and kept away from every place where she was likely to
be. Then she came to me, and sat down at my feet penitently, just as she