“I feel as though something ever so nice is going to happen, Miss Bayley, don’t you?” Dixie looked up glowingly from the slate on which she was trying to solve a difficult sum.
Her beloved friend and teacher stood at her side. These two had remained after school, that the older Martin girl might catch up with Ken in mathematics.
“I’d heaps rather write rhymes or sing songs or play on my violin,” Dixie confided when at last the slate had been washed clean and replaced in the desk.
“I’m glad,” Miss Bayley said as she pinned on her hat, preparing to depart. “You will derive much more joy from the poetry and the music, but arithmetic, too, must be mastered, if you are to go to college.”
The girl looked brightly up at her teacher. “I’d have to be living in a fairy-tale to have that happen,” she declared. Then laughingly she confessed, “There are only six pennies in the sock under my mattress, and you can’t think how hard I have tried to save all winter. However, I might call them a nest-egg toward the future education of the four Martins.”
The gold-brown eyes of the girl glowed from beneath the wide brim of her rather shabby hat, but the young teacher saw not the hat but only the radiant young face.
“Dixie,” she exclaimed suddenly, “this is the hour that the stage arrives. Let’s walk down the cañon road a little way and see if it is coming. Shall we?”
“I’d love to!” was the glad reply. “And maybe we’ll find some wild flowers.” Then, when they had started swinging along together, the younger girl asked, looking up at her taller companion, “Miss Bayley, are you expecting some one in particular to come to-day?”
The rosy flush in the teacher’s face puzzled Dixie. She had not thought that a romance might exist between Ken’s old friend and the young woman whom she so loved.
“No, dear, no one in particular,” was the quiet reply, and it was true, for although Miss Bayley had received a letter stating that Frederick Edrington would soon be through with his work of inspection, he had not said when he would revisit the cañon.