uneasiness, and feeling more averse than ever to taking part in the
matter, the doctor, after a hasty survey of her person, withdrew into
the background, and sat where he could not be seen. This brought the
short dress into full view, together with the dainty little foot,
nervously beating the floor.

"She's very young," he thought; "too young, by far," and Maddy's
chances of success were beginning to decline even before a word had
been spoken.

How terribly still it was for the time, during which telegraphic
communications were silently passing between Guy and the doctor, the
latter shaking his dead decidedly, while the former insisted that he
should do his duty. Madeline could almost hear the beatings of her
heart, and only by counting and recounting the poplar trees growing
across the street could she keep back the tears. What was he waiting
for, she wondered, and, at last, summoning all her courage, she lifted
her great brown eyes to Guy, and said, pleadingly:

"Would you be so kind, sir, as to begin?"

"Yes, certainly," and electrified by that young, bird-like voice, the
sweetest save one he had ever heard, Guy knocked down from the pile of
books the only one at all appropriate to the occasion, the others
being as far beyond what was taught in the district schools as his
classical education was beyond Madeline's common one.

Remembering that the teacher of whom he had once been for a week a
pupil, in the town of Framingham, had commenced operations by
sharpening a lead pencil, so he now sharpened a similar one,