"Teacher's got Beck's beau!"
"Teacher's got Beck's beau!" I heard it whispered among the school children. Rebecca heard, too, and paled a little, but looked up at me and smiled as frankly as ever.
Seeing her alone afterwards, I took occasion to remark, incidentally, "how kind it was of her friend, Mr. Rollin, to bring me home from church. Fanny was so slow! And I thought he was a very pleasant young man, but even the most estimable people, you know," I added, laughing, with an undertone of studied significance; "are not just fitted to enjoy each other's society always."
Then I blushed under the girl's clear, trustful gaze.
"You don't think I mind what the children talk!" she said.
Every day Rebecca appealed more and more, unconsciously, to what was most generous and grave and heedful in my nature. She seemed to be demanding of me, with mute, gentle importunity, to make real my ideal of life, to be what I knew she believed me to be. Her faith in my superior wisdom and goodness, her slow, timid way of confiding in me, with tears and blushes even; it was all very flattering, very captivating to one who had but so lately risen to occupy the pedestal of a moral instructress, and "my child," "my dear child," I said to her in many private discourses, with more than the tranquil grace and dignity with which such terms had been applied to me, only a year before, by the august principal of Mt. B—— Seminary.
Rebecca read my books, and I drew her out to talk with me about them. She prepared her lessons, with me, out of school. She knew that she might come whenever she chose to my little room at the Ark, which the chimney kept comfortably warm, and often I heard her footsteps on the stairs and her gentle knock at the door.
If I was troubled or perplexed on any account, Rebecca always seemed to understand in that quiet, unobtrusive way of hers, and followed my movements with a grave, restful sympathy in her eyes. On several occasions I had asked her, playfully, to walk up the lane with me after school. So it became a matter of course that she should wait for me. Often we took longer walks, for it was an "open winter," with only one or two light falls of snow.
Then I believed the "Tempter" came to me, in the form of another invitation to drive, from Mr. Rollin.
Occupied with my duties in the school-room, one afternoon, I was startled to observe these characters as suddenly and mysteriously raised as if by the unseen hand of a modern sibyl on the blackboard:—