There are two characteristics sure to be found among the residents of a small country village, and those are kindness of heart and a love of gossip. The former showed itself in Sandgate when Albert Page went to those his family were indebted to, and, with much humiliation to himself, asked them to wait. Mr. Hobbs' reply is all that is necessary to quote, as it was a reflex of all the others. "Don't ye worry one whit, Mr. Page," he said; "take your own time, an' if it's a year it's no matter. The only reason I called with the bill was because it's customary when an estate is bein' settled. Tell your folks I expect and want 'em to keep right on tradin' with me." When Alice appealed to Mr. Mears she also met only the kindest of words. "Ye can drive back an' forth, an' not be away from home over night," said he, "till snow comes, an' then I'll git ye a boardin'-place clus by the schoolhouse and fetch and carry ye Mondays and Fridays." The love of gossip showed itself as distinctly in a general discussion by the townsfolk of the affairs of the Pages. For a month after Albert had gone away and Alice had begun teaching, they were the subject of much after-church and sewing-circle talk. "If Alice could only git married now," observed Mrs. Mears, who was perhaps the leader among the gossips in Sandgate, "it 'ud be the most fortunit thing that could happen, but she holds her head perty middlin' high for a poor girl, which p'raps is nat'ral, she comin' from one o' the oldest families. They say there wa'n't nothin' left to either on 'em when the Widder Page died, an' the wonder is how she managed to git along as well as she did." Fortunately none of this gossip, of which Mrs. Mears' remarks are only a sample, reached Alice, for she had enough to bear as it was. The vexations of an effort to pound the rudiments of an education into the heads of two dozen or so barefooted boys and girls that comprised her charge were far less hard to bear than the desolation of a home bereft of mother and brother. Occasionally some one of the neighbors would drop in of an evening, or one or two of her girl friends come and stay all night. On Sundays she was, as she always had been, a regular attendant at the village church, where she formed one of the choir. She had never encouraged the attentions of any of the young men, who mostly wore the habiliments of farmers on week days and worse-fitting ones on Sundays, which accounted for Mrs. Mears' remark that "she held her head perty middlin' high." It was true in a way, not from any false pride, but rather because Alice was of a more refined and fastidious nature than those who "would a-wooing go."