Quite So | Page 5

when he died left me quite alone. I lived pretty much by myself,
having no interests outside of the district school, which seemed in a
manner my personal property. Eight years ago last spring a new pupil
was brought to the school, a slight slip of a girl, with a sad kind of face
and quiet ways. Perhaps it was because she was n't very strong, and
perhaps because she was n't used over well by those who had charge of
her, or perhaps it was because my life was lonely, that my heart
warmed to the child. It all seems like a dream now, since that April
morning when little Mary stood in front of my desk with her pretty
eyes looking down bashfully and her soft hair falling over her face. One
day I look up, and six years have gone by--as they go by in
dreams--and among the scholars is a tall girl of sixteen, with serious,
womanly eyes which I cannot trust myself to look upon. The old life
has come to an end. The child has become a woman and can teach the
master now. So help me Heaven, I did n't know that I loved her until
that day!
"Long after the children had gone home I sat in the school-room with
my face resting on my hands. There was her desk, the afternoon
shadows falling across it. It never looked empty and cheerless before. I
went and stood by the low chair, as I had stood hundreds of times. On
the desk was a pile of books, ready to be taken away, and among the
rest a small Latin grammar which we had studied together. What little
despairs and triumphs and happy hours were associated with it! I took it
up curiously, as if it were some gentle dead thing, and turned over the
pages, and could hardly see them. Turning the pages, idly so, I came to
a leaf on which something was written with ink, in the familiar girlish
hand. It was only the words 'Dear John,' through which she had drawn

two hasty pencil lines--I wish she had n't drawn those lines!" added
Bladburn, under his breath.
He was silent for a minute or two, looking off towards the camps,
where the lights were fading out one by one.
"I had no right to go and love Mary. I was twice her age, an awkward,
unsocial man, that would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong as
wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her. I locked the grammar in my
desk and the secret in my heart for a year. I could n't bear to meet her in
the village, and kept away from every place where she was likely to be.
Then she came to me, and sat down at my feet penitently, just as she
used to do when she was a child, and asked what she had done to anger
me; and then, Heaven forgive me! I told her all, and asked her if she
could say with her lips the words she had written, and she nestled in my
arms all a-trembling like a bird, and said them over and over again.
"When Mary's family heard of our engagement, there was trouble.
They looked higher for Mary than a middle-aged schoolmaster. No
blame to them. They forbade me the house, her uncles; but we met in
the village and at the neighbors' houses, and I was happy, knowing she
loved me. Matters were in this state when the war came on. I had a
strong call to look after the old flag, and I hung my head that day when
the company raised in our village marched by the school-house to the
railroad station; but I couldn't tear myself away. About this time the
minister's son, who had been away to college, came to the village. He
met Mary here and there, and they became great friends. He was a
likely fellow, near her own age, and it was natural they should like one
another. Sometimes I winced at seeing him made free of the home from
which I was shut out; then I would open the grammar at the leaf where
'Dear John' was written up in the corner, and my trouble was gone.
Mary was sorrowful and pale these days, and I think her people were
worrying her.
"It was one evening two or three days before we got the news of Bull
Run. I had gone down to the burying-ground to trim the spruce hedge
set round the old man's lot, and was just stepping into the enclosure,
when I heard voices from the opposite side. One was Mary's, and the

other I knew to be young Marston's, the minister's son.