Little Maid Marian | Page 8

so?" returned Heppy in an aggrieved voice. "How's I to know she wasn't a book-agent or a body selling home-made laces and embroidered shirt waists. She was carrying a bag and it might have been full of wares for all I knew."
"But she doesn't look like a peddler."
"Looks belie folks sometimes. Some of 'em is dressed as good as the best, in hats with feathers and kid gloves. She might have been that or anything, for all I could tell. I'll do just the same next time. She'd oughter have told her business right out, instead of hemming and hawing and asking was Mrs. Otway to home. That's the way they all do; get the name next door and come as brazen as you please asking for Mrs. this and that. I'd like to know who's to tell the sheep from the goats."
"I would know in a minute that Miss Dorothy wasn't a goat," said Marian.
"Oh, you know a heap, don't you," replied Heppy scornfully. "If you knew so much why didn't you tell me who it was first off?"
"I didn't know exactly who it was but I could easily guess, for I knew the teacher was coming some time soon."
"I don't see why your grandma didn't say I was to look out for her," Heppy went on with a new grievance.
"Maybe she thought you would know, because you helped get her room ready, and knew she was expected," Marian made excuse.
"As if I could remember anything on a Saturday, when I'd been pestered to death, answering the door a dozen times, while I was cleaning my kitchen. She might have chose some other day to come."
"She has to begin school on Monday, and besides that would be just as bad, for it would be wash-day and you are cross always then, Heppy, you know you are."
Heppy turned on her. "You just go out of here," she said. "I don't want you 'round underfoot, pestering me at meal-time nohow. I guess I can get a meal for four just as easy as for three and I don't need your help neither."
At this Marian was fain to depart, seeing that Heppy was in one of her worst moods, when everything was a grievance. It was a pleasant contrast when the little girl was met by Miss Dorothy's smile as she returned to the parlor, so she settled herself by the side of this new friend, folded her hands and let her feet dangle over the edge of the sofa. It was rather a slippery seat and in time it might be that she would have to wriggle back to a firmer place, but its nearness to Miss Dorothy was its attraction and she felt well satisfied and entirely secure when the teacher's arm encircled her and drew her closer. "I am to have one new pupil anyhow," said Miss Dorothy, smiling down. "Won't it be nice for us to be going to school together every day, Marian?"
"Oh, am I going?" Marian looked from one grandparent to another.
Mrs. Otway nodded sedately. "We have concluded that it is best," she said. "Your grandfather has many affairs to attend to, and it is a tax upon his time to teach you, therefore, since you will not need to go to school unattended, we think it best. We shall see how it works, at all events, and if it seems wise to withdraw you later, we can do so."
Marian gave a long sigh of satisfaction, but said nothing. She was constantly told that little children should be seen and not heard, and moreover she thought it might hurt her grandfather's feelings if she showed too much pleasure at the change. Yet when she gave the new teacher a glad smile, Miss Dorothy realized that the prospect of school was a pleasant one to at least one of her pupils.

CHAPTER III
A New Road
Instead of sitting in a straight-backed chair in her grandfather's study, conning over dry lessons while Mr. Otway wrote or read, it was quite a different experience for Marian to go to school to Miss Dorothy in a cheerful little schoolhouse where twenty other girls were seated each before her particular desk. Lessons with Grandpa Otway had been very stupid, for he required literal, word-for-word, gotten-by-heart pages, had no mercy upon faulty spelling, and frowned down mistakes in arithmetic examples. He did not make much of a point of writing, for he wrote a queer, scratchy hand himself, and so Marian could scarcely form her letters legibly, a fact of which she was made ashamed when she saw how well Ruth Deering wrote, and discovered that Marjorie Stone sent a letter every week to her brother at college.
However, the rest of it was such an improvement upon other years, that every morning Marian started