"Well, now, Stacey, I guess you'll need to move. I had another session with the old man, but he won't give in, so I'm off for Chicago. Mother's brother, George Chapman, who lives about as near the schoolhouse on the other side, will take you in. I guess we'd better go right down now and see about it. I've said good-by to the old man--for good this time; we didn't shake hands, either," he said, as they started down the road together. He was very stern and hard. Something of the father was hidden under his laughing exterior. Stacey regretted deeply the necessity which drove him out of Allen's house. Mrs. Allen and Mattie had appealed to him very strongly. For years he had lived far from young women, and there was a magical power in the intimate home actions of this young girl. Her bare head, with simple arrangement of hair, someway seemed the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He thought of her that night, as he sat at the table with Chapman and his aged mother. They lived alone, and their lives were curiously silent. Once in a while a low-voiced question, and that was all. George read the _Popular Science, Harper's Monthly Magazine_, and the _Open Court_, and brooded over them with slow intellectual movement. It was wonderful the amount of information he secreted from these periodicals. He was better informed than many college graduates. He had little curiosity about the young stranger. He understood that he was to teach the school; beyond that he did not care to go. He tried Wallace once or twice on the latest discoveries of John Fiske and Edison, and then gave him up and retired to his seat beside the sitting-room stove. On the following Monday morning school began, and as Wallace took his way down the lane the wrecked church came again to his eyes. He walked past it with slow feet. His was a deeply religious nature, one that sorrowed easily over sin. Suffering of the poor did not trouble him; hunger seemed a little thing beside losing one's everlasting soul. Therefore, to come from his studies upon such a monument of human depravity as this rotting church was to receive a shock and to hear a call to action. Approaching the schoolhouse, his thought took a turn toward the scholars and toward Mattie. He had forgotten to ask her if she intended to be one of his pupils. There were several children already gathered at the weather-beaten door as he came up. It was all very American--the box-like house of white, the slender teacher approaching, the roughly clad urchins waiting. He said, "Good morning, scholars!"