"I don't know what I shall do," she said, in a troubled voice. "Those children have caught up with me in arithmetic, and by next week they'll be ahead of me; and I feel as if I oughtn't to take Miss Eldridge's money if I can't do all she engaged me for. What would you do if you were me?"
"Could you not prepare yourself by study, and so keep in advance of your little pupils?" he inquired kindly.
"I don't believe I could," she replied despondently. "I tried to do the sums that came next, last night, and they wouldn't come right, all I could do; and I got a headache besides."
"I have an hour to spare," said the professor, pulling out his watch: "perhaps, if you will bring me your book and slate, I can elucidate the rule which is perplexing you."
"Oh, will you really?" she exclaimed, a radiant smile lighting up her troubled face. "I'll bring them right away. How kind, how very kind you are, to bother with my sums, when you have so much Greek in your head!" And, obeying an impulse, as she so often did, she caught his hand in both her own and kissed it heartily. Then she skimmed across the parlor, and he heard her child's voice "lilting lightly up the" stairs as he stood—in a position suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax-works—gazing fixedly at the hand which she had kissed.
"She regards me as a father," he said to himself severely. "Am I going mad? Or becoming childish? No; I am only sixty. But, even if it were possible, it would be base, unmanly, to take advantage of her loneliness, her gratitude. No, I will be firm."
So, when the offending "example" was handed to him, with the above-quoted touching statement as to its total depravity, he looked only at the slate. Gently and patiently, as if to a little child, he pointed out the errors and expounded the rule, amply rewarded by her joyful exclamation, "Oh, I see exactly how it's done, now! You do explain things beautifully. I really think I could have learned a good deal if I'd had a teacher like you when I went to school."
"Come to me whenever your lessons perplex you, my dear," he answered, still looking at the slate; "come freely, as if—as if I were your father."
"Ah, how kind, how good you are to me!" she cried, seizing his slender, wrinkled hand and holding it between her soft palms. "How glad papa must be to know it! It almost seems like having him again. Must you go? Good-night."
And, innocently, as if to her father, she held up her face for a kiss.