Dick glanced at her with quick admiration in his handsome young eyes. He was twenty-four, but he blundered over his words like a schoolboy. “Miss Graham,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say I think it’s awfully fine in you, don’t you know, to teach, and all that sort of thing? Of course, girls do things now. I mean nice girls, don’t you know. Why, cousin Kate gave music lessons before she married; and she was a Townsend. Still, it’s people like that, don’t you know, that can afford to do things like that!” “I don’t suppose any one can afford to be dependent,” Annie said simply, “and my father is really poor, Mr. Temple.” Her beautiful direct look as she said this made the young fellow’s heart suddenly leap. He wanted to burst out and tell her how much he admired her; admired? no, loved her! That was the word. Yes, he, who had thought he had outlived all that sort of thing. All in a moment he felt that he wanted to tell her this; but she seemed so remote that he dared not speak. “I suppose I ought to get my governor to go and call on hers,” he reflected; “these decayed gentlefolks are death on propriety. But maybe she wouldn’t look at me, anyway,” he added to himself, in a miserable afterthought; for she began to speak in such an interested way of some mathematical work she had to do that night, that he felt there was no room for him in her thoughts. He left her at the college door and went back, ardent and despairing, to confide in his cousin Kate, who, it must be admitted, had rather a startled expression when he told her he was “all bowled over by Miss Graham.” “But, Dick, what would your father say if it got serious? Cousin Henry has such ideas, you know. She’s a charming girl, but we don’t know anything about her people.” “We know they are poor,” Dick said boldly; “but that doesn’t matter in the least. Surely you are not so narrow, Cousin Kate, as to think it matters?” “No, that doesn’t matter, of course,” cousin Kate said doubtfully. * * * * * As for Annie, she went, smiling a little, and blushing a little, upstairs to her room. But she did no work in higher mathematics that night.