"You don't know," she said. "I was brought up different--and it was before you came, and I never knew that, what you told me about not trusting people. I thought it was all true, and oh!--there ain't anybody to help! Oh, I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead!" "Rebecca," I said, a little frightened, and convinced that the girl had some serious trouble at heart. "Tell me what the trouble is? Has any one deceived you? And why should any one wish to deceive you, child?" Rebecca only moaned and shook her head. "But you must tell me," I said; "I can't help you unless you do." She drew herself farther away from me, with only these convulsive sobs for a reply. I did not attempt to get nearer to her, to comfort her as it had been my first impulse to do. She had repulsed me once. "You are nervous and excited, my dear," I decided to say; "and something of little consequence, probably, looks like a mountain of difficulty to you. At any rate, when you get ready to confide in me, you must come to me. I shall not question you again." So I left her, less with a feeling of commiseration for her than with a deep sense of my own pressing burdens and responsibilities. I had another ex-pupil (Rebecca had been out of school for several weeks), who was a source of considerable anxiety to me--Luther Larkin. He had ceased coming to the Ark to sing with the others. He had not played on his violin since that first night when the string broke. I heard that he had gone to New Bedford; and it was a day or two afterwards that, coming out of the school-house after the meeting, I saw him standing on the steps alone. I knew that an escort from among the Wallencamp youths was close behind me. I hastened to put my hand on Luther's arm. "Will you walk home with me?" I said, looking up in his face and smiling. I knew that the face lifted to his then was a beautiful one, that the hand resting on his arm was small and daintily gloved, unlike the bare coarse hands of the Wallencampers. I knew that my dress had an air and a grace also foreign to Wallencamp, that a delicate perfume went up from my garments, that my voice was more than usually winning. I experienced a dangerous sense of satisfaction in the conquest of this unsophisticated youth--a conquest not wholly without its retributive pain and intoxication. I felt the Cradlebow's arm tremble as we walked up the lane. "I have a little private lecture to give you, Luther," I said. "Of course you have been very much absorbed in your own affairs lately, but is that an excuse for forsaking your old friends entirely? Especially if you are going away. Are you going away?" "Yes," said Luther. "When?" I asked. "In April," he answered briefly. [Illustration: GRANDMA KEELER INTRODUCES THE NEW TEACHER. Scene from the Play.] "And weren't you ever coming to see me, again?" I murmured with designing soft reproach. "I was coming up by and by, to say good-bye," said Luther, brokenly.