They were talking eagerly, but it was only about what he had written in regard to “Theory and Practice” at the last county examination.
“I think you carry out your ideas real well,” Serene said, admiringly, when he had finished his exposition. “’Tisn’t everybody does that. I know I’ve learned a good deal more this term than I ever thought to when I started in.”
The teacher was visibly pleased. He was a slight, wiry little fellow, with alert eyes, a cynical smile, and an expression of self-confidence, which was justifiable only on the supposition that he had valuable information as to his talents and capacity unknown to the world at large.
“I think you have learned a good deal of me,” he observed, condescendingly; “more than any of the younger ones. I have taken some pains with you. It’s a pleasure to teach willing learners.”
At this morsel of praise, expressed in such a strikingly original manner, Serene flushed and looked prettier than ever. She was always pretty, this slip of a girl, with olive skin, pink cheeks, and big, dark eyes, and she always looked a little too decorative, too fanciful, for her environment in this substantial brick farm-house, set in the midst of fat, level acres of good Ohio land. It was as if a Dresden china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.
Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he scarcely knew; it is as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart.
“He gives them to me because he thinks I look like that,” she thought with a quick, happy thrill.
“Yes,” he went on, rather confusedly, his mind being divided between what he was saying and a curiosity to find out if she would be as angry as she was the last time if he should try to kiss the nearest pink cheek; “I think it would be a good idea for you to keep on with your algebra by yourself, and you might read that history you began. I don’t know who’s going to have the school next fall. Now, if I were going to be here this summer, I——”
“Why, Don,” Serene interrupted him, using the name she had not often spoken since Adoniram Jessup, after a couple of years in the High School, had come back to live at home, and to teach in their district—“why, Don, I thought your mother said you were going to help on the farm this summer.”
Adoniram smiled, a thin-lipped, complacent little smile.