set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus
schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself
keeping track, in her mind's eye, of her little favorites--some of
them youthful reprobates--in their progress up the ladder of knowledge
and out into the world.

But what of Sir Galahad? He had dallied, but about this time--the
sixth year of her life as a teacher--he appeared. Not as she had
imagined him--a lover of great personal distinction, amazing talents,
compelling virtues, and large estates; yet, nevertheless, a
presentable being in trousers, whose devotion touched her maidenly
heart until it reciprocated the passion which his lips expressed. He
was a young bookkeeper in a banker's office, with a taste for literary
matters and a respectable gift for private theatricals. A small social
club was the medium by which they became intimate. Sir Galahad was
refined in appearance and bearing, a trifle too delicate for perfect
manliness, yet, as Miss Willis's mother justly observed, a gentle soul
to live with. He had a taste for poetry, and a sentimental vein which
manifested itself in verses of a Wordsworthian simplicity descriptive
of his lady-love's charms. No wonder Marion fell in love with him, and
renounced, without even a sigh of regret, her vision of a husband with
lordly means. Sir Galahad had only his small means, which were not
enough for a matrimonial venture. They would wait in the hope that
some opportunity for preferment would present itself. So for three
years--years when she was in the heyday of her comeliness--they
attended the social club as an engaged couple, and fed their mutual
passion on the poets and occasional chaste embraces. Marion felt sure
that something would happen before long to redeem the situation and
establish her Sir Galahad in the seat to which his merit entitled him.
Her favorite vision was of some providential catastrophe, even an