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Five years had but slightly dimmed the freshness of Miss Willis’s charms. She was as comely as ever. She was a trifle stouter, a trifle less girlish in manner, and only a trifle–what shall we call it?–wilted in appearance. The close atmosphere of a school-room is not conducive to rosiness of complexion; and the constant strain of guiding over forty immature minds in the paths of knowledge will weigh upon the flesh, though the soul be patient and the heart light. Miss Willis’s class comprised the children whose average age was twelve to thirteen–those who had been in the school three years. There were both boys and girls, and they remained with her a year. She had begun with the youngest children, but promotion had presently established her in this position.

Forty immature minds–minds just groping on the threshold of life–to be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months–the school term,–then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year. Glendale’s manufacturing population included several nationalities, so that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis’s eye included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose title as Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children, though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis’s pride that she knew the identity of every one of her boys and girls, and carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible lapses of memory. She loved her classes, and it was a grief to her at first to be obliged to pass them on at the end of the school year. But habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect, and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself keeping track, in her mind’s eye, of her little favorites–some of them youthful reprobates–in their progress up the ladder of knowledge and out into the world.

But what of Sir Galahad? He had dallied, but about this time–the sixth year of her life as a teacher–he appeared. Not as she had imagined him–a lover of great personal distinction, amazing talents, compelling virtues, and large estates; yet, nevertheless, a presentable being in trousers, whose devotion touched her maidenly heart until it reciprocated the passion which his lips expressed. He was a young bookkeeper in a banker’s office, with a taste for literary matters and a respectable gift for private theatricals. A small social club was the medium by which they became intimate. Sir Galahad was refined in appearance and bearing, a trifle too delicate for perfect manliness, yet, as Miss Willis’s mother justly observed, a gentle soul to live with. He had a taste for poetry, and a sentimental vein which manifested itself in verses of a Wordsworthian simplicity descriptive of his lady-love’s charms. No wonder Marion fell in love with him, and renounced, without even a sigh of regret, her vision of a husband with lordly means. Sir Galahad had only his small means, which were not enough for a matrimonial venture. They would wait in the hope that some opportunity for preferment would present itself. So for three years–years when she was in the heyday of her comeliness–they attended the social club as an engaged couple, and fed their mutual passion on the poets and occasional chaste embraces. Marion felt sure that something would happen before long to redeem the situation and establish her Sir Galahad in the seat to which his merit entitled him. Her favorite vision was of some providential catastrophe, even an epidemic or wholesale maiming, by which the partners of the banking-house and all in authority over her lover should be temporarily incapacitated, and the entire burden of the business be thrown on his shoulders long enough to demonstrate his true worth. As a sequel she beheld him promptly admitted to partnership and herself blissfully married.