After her mother's death Henrietta taught school. That she taught in a town that had not known her was helpful, undoubtedly. What lies she told there about her romances in other places were readily enough believed. She was a satisfactory, commanding teacher, having little trouble with her students, and a fine, clean figure always, in her black shirt, white shirt-waist, and a peculiarly clean neatness. She had a gesture of smoothing her trim waist downward toward her belt with the edges of her hands that was in itself a certificate of clean spinsterhood. Her misfortune came suddenly and with catastrophic unexpectedness. She had worked her way upward until she was teaching mathematics (higher algebra, to be exact) in the high school of a southern Illinois town. With the teachers of a near-by river town she had kept in close correspondence and for them she had built a romance of lies, telling of a lover who was impetuous, young, handsome, and brilliant--“too young for poor me,” Henrietta had written, and “his father objects, and if there is a match it will have to be a run-away one. His name”--she had hesitated, fearing to use “Billy Vane” lest she might have used it before--“is Freeman Todder,” she had written, jotting down that of the “A Class” boy who had remained in the classroom while she was writing the letter. Followed much more, romantically untruthful, but interesting and intended to be so. The next week two of her teacher friends to whom she had written, wrote her they meant to make her a visit; they were wild to meet Freeman Todder, they wrote. Henrietta had one of her sudden panics. She was sitting at her desk in the schoolroom when she read the letter and she looked toward Freeman Todder. The unlucky youth was passing a note across the aisle. “Freeman, come here!” Henrietta commanded, and he arose and walked to her desk. He was as tall then as he was ever to become. He was one of those boys who think they are already men, and who have begun to accumulate the vices of bad men, considering them evidences of maturity. He was already one of the town dandies. “What's the matter now?” he asked when he stood at her desk. “You know what is the matter,” she said. “This cannot go on, Freeman. I want to talk to you. Remain after school.” He went back to his seat with swaggering bravado, and made especial efforts to break more of the few slight rules Henrietta had imposed on the scholars. He hoped she would notice and expel him. He hated school and wanted to be free to lead a man's life. “It will be all the better for him,” Henrietta told herself, excusing herself, during the short hours of courtship to which she subjected him before they “eloped.” “I can make something out of him and if I do not he will go to ruin. He is headed that way and there is no one to stop him if I do not.”