Dawn of the Morning

by Grace Livingston Hill

"I guess you've been understood all right," said Daniel grimly over his shoulder.

With a last angry glare at Dawn's protector, and a threat he would never dare to carry out, Silas Dobson took himself off the scene of action.

The next week there appeared a prominent editorial about the public school and its brilliant young teacher, who was doing so much for the youth of the village, and should be encouraged in every way by the parents.

Daniel read it to a group of the boys in the school yard, and then cut it out with his penknife and pinned it to the blackboard, as an expression of the sentiments of the whole school.

After that little episode, there was a closer bond than ever between Daniel and his teacher. They never talked it over, nor even mentioned it, except that Dawn, as Silas's footsteps died away that afternoon, had put her little hand on the boy's rough one for just an instant, and said:

"Thank you so much, Daniel. I do not know what I should have done if you had not stayed."

Daniel had turned away with a sudden feeling as if he was going to choke, while the blood in his heart pounded up into his face. But aloud he only said in a bashful tone:

"Aw, that's nothin'. He needs a good lickin', an' I'd like to be the one to give it to him."

Afterward, Dawn wondered that she had dared to speak as she had to Silas Dobson, a selectman, and the editor of the paper. And if she had it in her to do so now, how was it that she had allowed Harrington Winthrop to lead her on to a hated marriage, when she might have easily stopped it by being decided? Had her brief months of independence given her courage? It seemed strange to her now that she had been so afraid to tell her father what she felt about it until matters had gone so far that it was almost impossible to stop it. Her heart burned within her sometimes to go back and tell Harrington Winthrop just what she felt about him. She had been weak, she decided, terribly weak, in yielding in the beginning to her desire for a home of her own, and for freedom from any possibility of having to stay in the house with her father's wife. Yet, were not all women weak and helpless sometimes, when it came to a testing of their strength against men? Her mother had not been able to cope with her father's will. It was all a mixed-up world, and full of trouble. She turned on her scanty corn-husk pillow and wished for the dawn of a day that would have no sorrow.

Just why it was that her experience with Silas Dobson made the thought of Charles and her marriage so much more vivid than before, Dawn could not understand, and she thought about it a great deal in the watches of the night, when she should have been sleeping. A new phase of her position was forced upon her: she was in a measure deceiving other people about herself. Silas Dobson, disagreeable as he was, had no idea that his attentions were an insult to her because she was already married. Of course she could refuse to accept attentions from any one, but if Silas Dobson had been a pleasant and agreeable man, it might have been difficult to explain to him without telling him the truth why she could not ride nor walk with him. It was all a terrible problem, and night after night she cried herself to sleep.