AT

T ten-thirty the gray-templed, facelined little master of the Charlevoix School tapped on the edge of his bell with a ruler, and saw seventeen of his eighteen pupils rush noisily out of the old one-room school-house upon the circle of bare, white ground in the midst of the pine-forest, and he was left alone with two pressing problems, not of algebra or arithmetic.

For a still minute he remained at his desk up behind the big drum-stove gazing thoughtfully at one of the problems. As always in the three weeks since he had, providentially, it seemed to him, found this teaching vacancy and begun the school, she was sitting at her desk. Why did she never go out at recess with the other pupils? And why did she come and go from the school-house alone? Most of the boys and girls were under twelve, but there were five or six near the age she had given, "sixteen, goin' on seventeen, pliss."

McLemore told himself that he must rise and walk up to her and say: "Gertrude, why do you stay in here at every recess? Why don't you go out with the

other pupils?" He had a suspicion, based not on any precedent of hers, but more on her manner of walking and talking, that she might answer, "Ad ze rezess times, M'sieur le Tich, s'all I nod be ad ze places I pliss, yes?"

He rose and walked to the window instead. It was the end of October, the school not having opened on scheduletime for lack of a teacher; but autumn had hardly touched northwestern Louisiana, and some of the small trees that maintained a precarious life among the mighty pines still wore their late-summer dresses of gold-flecked green. Scattered along the shore of Lady Lucie Lake and here and there in the deep forest that crowded up close to the school-house clearing were the farms that supplied him with pupils.

The uneasy little master looked at his watch; ten of the fifteen minutes of recess were gone already and he had not solved his first problem or even considered his second. Postponing Gertrude once more, he walked briskly to his desk, sat down.