Carin heard Azalea stammeringly trying to make clear to her pupil the nature of a sponge, and discreetly withdrew to the most distant part of the schoolroom and began busying herself by making a sketch of the storm-tossed trees in the wild purple light. She heard Azalea’s voice going on and on, kindly, gently, insistently; heard Paralee’s gruff answers; but the rain and the wind drowned the words. It was only when Azalea called to her that she learned of the nature of the conversation. Paralee was standing with half dried garments before the fire. She had eaten her little repast, and with her one poor hand was brushing back the hair that straggled about her face. “Paralee,” said Azalea, “wants to be a teacher, Carin. She has to make her own living, and that is the way she means to do it.” Not a gleam of Azalea’s eye, not the barest flicker of the voice, told that she thought such an ambition outrageous. The heavy-faced, half-clothed child, so dark and hateful, so ugly and suspicious, might have been the embodiment of light for all that Azalea’s manner betrayed. Once more Carin’s affectionate appreciation of her friend went out in swift response. “Does she?” asked Carin in the same friendly tone. “Well, we’ll teach her what we know, and then she can go to some one better fitted to make a teacher of her.” They could see the girl peering up furtively from under her hair, wondering if it could be possible that they believed in her. No one ever had. But obstinately, passionately, in the face of all things, she believed in herself. “I can’t do nothing else,” she said in her deep voice. “I hain’t got but one hand.” “She lost the other,” said Azalea in her even, pleasant voice, “when she was trying to shoot rabbits for the family to eat. She and her grandmother have come down with her brother while he works at the sawmill Mrs. Rowantree has set up on the Ravenel Branch.” “He wouldn’t come ’less I did, too,” explained Paralee. “He didn’t like to leave home.” What could the home be that the brother of this girl would hate to leave, Carin wondered. It seemed as if Paralee must have come out of a cave rather than a house. “We Panthers has always lived by ourselves,” the girl said in half angry explanation. “Jake hain’t used to talking to strange folks. And he didn’t have no proper clothes for leaving home.” “Panther is a strange name, isn’t it?” asked Carin. “Are there many families of your name in these mountains, Paralee?” “It hain’t our name,” returned the girl. “Our name’s Marr. My granddad was a fighter, he was. He kilt six men. It was a war. They called him the Panther of Soco River. Then they called us all Panthers. We don’t care!” she added defiantly. “One name suits us as well as t’other.”