How terribly still it was for the time during which telegraphic communications were silently passing between Guy and the doctor, the latter shaking his head decidedly, while the former insisted that he should do his duty. Madeline could almost hear the beatings of her heart, and only by counting and recounting the poplar trees growing across the street could she keep back the tears. What was he waiting for, she wondered, and, at last, summoning all her courage, she lifted her great brown eyes to Guy, and said, pleadingly: “Would you be so kind, sir, as to begin? I am afraid I shall forget.” “Yes, certainly,” and electrified by that young, bird-like voice, the sweetest save one he had ever heard, Guy took from the pile of books which the doctor had arranged upon the table, the only one at all appropriate to the occasion, the others being as far beyond what was taught in district schools as his classical education was beyond Madeline’s common one. When a boy of ten, or thereabouts, Guy had spent a part of a summer with his grandmother in the country, and for a week had attended a district school. But he was so utterly regardless of rules and restrictions, talking aloud and walking about whenever the fancy took him, that he was ignominiously dismissed at the end of the week, and that was all the experience he had ever had in the kind of school Madeline was to teach. But even this helped him a little, for remembering that the teacher in Farmingham had commenced her operations by sharpening a lead pencil, so he now sharpened a similar one, determining as far as he could to follow Miss Burr’s example. Maddy counted every fragment as it fell upon the floor, wishing so much that he would commence, and fancying that it would not be half so bad to have him approach her with some one of the terrible dental instruments lying before her, as it was to sit and wait as she was waiting. Had Guy Remington reflected a little, he would never have consented to do the doctor’s work; but, unaccustomed to country usages, especially those pertaining to schools and teachers, he did not consider that it mattered in the least which examined that young girl, Dr. Holbrook or himself. Viewing it somewhat in the light of a joke, he rather enjoyed it; and as the Farmingham teacher had first asked her pupils their names and ages, so he, when the pencil was sharpened sufficiently, startled Madeline by asking her name. “Madeline Amelia Clyde,” was the meek reply, which Guy recorded with a flourish. Now, Guy Remington intended no irreverence; indeed, he could not tell what he did intend, or what it was which prompted his next query: “Who gave you this name?” Perhaps he fancied himself a boy again in the Sunday-school, and standing before the railing of the altar, where, with others of his age, he had been asked the question propounded to Madeline Clyde, who did not hear the doctor’s smothered laugh as he retreated into the adjoining room.