So absorbed was I in my grief, that I had not heard the sound of footsteps, and with a start of surprise I looked up and met the serene, handsome eyes of _Dr. Clayton_, who stood at my side! He had been to visit a patient, he said, and was on his way home, when, seeing the door ajar, he had come in, hoping to find me there, “but I did not expect this,” he continued, pointing to the tears on my cheek. “What is the matter? Don’t the scholars behave well, or are you homesick?” At this question I began to cry so violently, that the doctor, after exhausting all his powers of persuasion, finally laid his hand soothingly on my rough, tangled curls, ere I could be induced to stop. Then, when I told him how disappointed I was, how I wished I had never tried to teach, and how I meant to give it up, he talked to me so kindly, so brotherlike, still keeping his hand on my shoulder, where it had fallen when I lifted up my head, that I grew very calm, thinking I could stay in that gloomy room forever, if _he_ were only there! He was, as I have said before, very handsome, and his manner was so very fascinating, and his treatment of me so much like what I fancied Charlie’s would be, were he a grown up man and I a little girl, that I began to like him very, very much, thinking then that my feeling for him was such as a child would entertain for a father, for I had heard that he was twenty-seven, and between that and thirteen there was, in my estimation, an impassable gulf. “I wish I had my buggy here,” he said at last, after consulting his watch, which pointed to half-past five, “I wish I had my buggy here, for then I could carry you home. You’ll wet your feet, and you ought not to walk. Suppose you ride in my lap; but no,” he added, quickly, “you’d better not, for Mrs. Thompson and Mother Ross would make it a neighborhood talk.” There was a wicked look in his eye as he said this, and I secretly wondered if he entertained the same opinion of _Dell_, that he evidently did of her sister. At length, shaking my hand, he bade me good-bye, telling me that the Examining Committee had placed _me_ and my school in his charge, and that he should probably visit me officially on Thursday of the following week. Like a very foolish child, I watched him until a turn in the road hid him from view, and then, with a feeling I could not analyze, I started for my boarding-place, thinking that if I gave up my school I should wait until after Thursday. In the doorway, with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and her hair, as she herself said, “at sixes and sevens,” was Mrs. Ross, who, after informing me that “it had been a desput rainy day,” asked, “if I knew whether Dr. Clayton had been to Captain Thompson’s?”