"You are a wicked child; and if you persist in this talk, I shall have to punish you."
"Are you going to beat me? Beat away. But it's true."
He did not beat her; but one day, meeting Hester on the hill as she walked to school, he went so far as to suggest that Myra's spirit needed taming. She had been allowed to run loose, and her behaviour at home caused him many searchings of heart. He made no doubt that her behaviour in school was scarcely more satisfactory.
Hester admitted that he surmised correctly.
He had never been blessed with a daughter of his own, and hardly knew what to do with an unruly girl. Might he leave the matter in Miss Marvin's hands?
"If," said Hester, "you are speaking of her behaviour in school, you certainly may. She is jealous, poor child, because her brother has taken a fancy to be fond of me. In her place I should be furious. But I think we are going to be friends."
"Some form of punishment—if I might suggest—"
"I don't know of any that meets the case," Hester answered gravely.
"I have often,"—he fastened on her that gaze of his which she most of all disliked—"I have oftentimes, of late especially, felt even Calvin to be a responsibility, without a mother's care." He went on from this to the suggestion he had hinted to Mrs. Purchase. Would Miss Marvin be prepared (for an honorarium) to give his son private lessons? Could she afford the time? "I shrink from exposing him to influences, so often malign, of a boarding-school. What I should most of all desire for him is a steady, sympathetic home influence, a—may I say it?—a motherly influence."
Hester at this moment, averting her eyes, was aware of an old woman a few yards away, coming up the road; a woman erect as a soldier, with strong, almost mannish features, and eyes that glared at her fiercely from under a washed-out blue sunbonnet. Mr. Sam gave her good-morning as she went by, but she neither answered nor seemed to hear him.