"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully; and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many girls--" "Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about that, and I--" "And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be wasted on school-teaching?" Wrath tingled in Kate's voice. She heard Miss Madigan's gasp of horror, and could imagine the fishy disconsolateness of her expression. And she saw the red-faced little man opposite her start, as at the injection of a foreign tongue into the interview. "Eh--what? Oh, yes," he said dully. "I mean--no. It'll be--it's all right." "Oh, Mr. Pemberton, how can I thank you!" Miss Madigan clasped her hands. "Yes; I spoke to Forrest yesterday, and--and, of course, Murchison's willing," went on the little man, gravely. "But there's no vacancy just now, so they'll arrange to appoint substitutes. It's the way they do in cities, I understand. And Miss Cecilia here will be--" "My name, Mr. Pemberton, is Kate!" "And Kate's exceedingly grateful." Miss Madigan gazed amazed at her niece; she didn't look grateful. "Not at all; not at all," murmured Pemberton, feeling for his papers helplessly. "I'm so busy--" "It--is good of you," stammered Kate, rising. "I am--very much obliged to you." She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All at once she felt so old, so young, so niched forever in a somber, gray life, so settled, so bound up by small formalities, so miserably unlike a Madigan! * * * * * Yet the Madigan in Kate waked with a defiant brightness when the first call came that took her temporarily over the threshold of the new life. She left her own school-room, where her role was as congenial and irresponsible as Sissy's, with an air of importance that roused envy in her mates' hearts. The very pretense rallied her, excited her, inspired her to continue to pretend after she had left her audience behind her. And though she entered the lower class-room, of which she was to have charge for a day, with a terrified feeling of being thrown to the lions, she faced the undisciplined mob that licked its lips in anticipation of a feast on raw young substitute with a flash in her eye that promised battle first. And she did make a hit at the beginning, thanks to her sister and present pupil, Bessie, who was invariably late to school.