Sylvena Willard came in, her cheeks flushed by her ride through the crisp air. The assembled inquisitors of the Dunham district instinctively knew that she was there as the teacher’s defender, and they surveyed her with disapprobation.
But she nodded cheery little greetings here and there and sat down on one of the front seats with great composure.
“Holds her age tumble well, don’t she?” mumbled Deacon Burgess, surveying the profile above the fluffy collar of her jacket.
But Uncle Paul gazed at her grudgingly. “It ain’t the real Christians that go to Heaven on flow’ry beds of ease,” he grunted. “She’s had a pretty soft time of it all her life now, I tell ye.”
At that moment the hush was broken by one of those solemn explosions that the irreverent call a “vestry cough,” and “Wolf” Doughty, so nicknamed on account of a swelling on his cheek, swung in his seat and suggested:
“I reckon we might as well proceed to elect a moderator to preside this ev’nin’, whilst we are waitin’ for the defendant ’foresaid. Any one that has a mind on the subject will please say something.”
At this hint Deacon Burgess was preparing to nominate Doughty, when there was a bustle in the entry-way and Squire Prin Look came in, blinking the outside gloom from his kindly eyes. The little teacher followed close in the lee of his generous bulk, her eyes downcast. The lawyer had carefully timed his late arrival, both on his own account and for the sake of the schoolma’am.
“We’ll let ’em get settled on the roost,” he had told her, “and their first spell of cawing over and done with.”
He lifted her chair from the platform and placed it so that she did not have to meet their eye-borings. Then he went up and calmly sat down in the visitor’s chair, the only seat on the platform, with an air of proprietorship.
He crossed his knees and swung his dusty foot comfortably, oblivious to the frowns on the faces of Doughty and his adherents. The old dog beside him surveyed the audience with benignly extended jaws and rapped his tail as though it were a chairman’s gavel.