Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885

"I am going," said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, "to marry a young woman whose mind I can mould."

Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn't possibly make it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.

When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one question, with a variable termination. The dear five hundred friends exclaim, with uplifted hands,-

"What could have possessed him," or "her"?

In the present case the latter termination was adopted, with but one dissenting voice: Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones, "Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart in a few short years!"

The professor would have been very indignant had any one ventured to suggest to him that the pretty face had anything to do with it. He imagined himself entirely above and beyond such flimsy considerations. Yet it is sadly doubtful whether an example in long division, on a smeared slate, brought to him with tears and faltering accents by Miss Christina, would have produced the effect which followed when Miss Rosamond May betrayed her shameful ignorance by handing him the slate and saying forlornly, "I've done it seven times, and it comes out differently wrong every time. Can you see what's the matter?" and two wet blue eyes looked into his through his spectacles, with an expression which said plainly, "You are my last and only hope."

She was standing by the massive marble-topped table which was the central feature of the parlor of their boarding-house. One plump hand-with dimples where the knuckles should have been-rested upon the unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate. She was a teacher of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge's academy for young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths of her ignorance.

But her father had been a professor, and a widower; and shortly before he died he had manifested an appreciation of the stately principal which, but for his untimely death,-he was only seventy,-might have expanded into "that perfect union of souls" for which her disciplined heart secretly pined.

So when it was first whispered, and then exclaimed, that Professor May had left nothing, absolutely nothing, for his daughter but a very small life-insurance premium and the furniture of their rented house, with a little old-fashioned jewelry and silverware of the smallest possible intrinsic value, Miss Christina called upon Miss May and told her that, if she would accept it, there was a vacancy in the academy, with a salary of two hundred dollars a year and board, but not lodging.

"And if you remain with me, my dear, as I hope you will, I can give you a room next year, after the new wing is added; and, meanwhile, I know of a vacant room, at two dollars a week, in a highly-respectable lodging-house."

"You are very kind," replied Rosamond, in a quivering voice. "But indeed I am afraid I don't know enough to teach even the very little girls. So I'm afraid you'd better get somebody else. Don't you think you had?"

"No," said Miss Christina, patting the useless little hand which lay on her lap. "You will only be obliged to hear spelling- and reading-lessons, and teach the class of little girls who have not gone beyond the first four rules of arithmetic, and perhaps you will help them to play on their holidays: you could impart an element of refinement to their recreations more readily than an older teacher could."

"Is that all?" exclaimed Rosamond, almost cheerfully. "Oh, I can easily do that much. I love little girls. I will be so good to all the homesick ones. When shall I come?"

"As soon as you can, my dear," replied Miss Christina.

In a few weeks Rosamond had settled into the routine of her new life,-going every morning to the academy, where she spent the day in hearing lessons, binding up broken hearts, playing heartily with her scholars in the intermissions, and being idolized by them in each of her various capacities. She did not forget her father, but it was impossible for her sweet and childlike nature to remain in mourning long.

Professor Silex had felt a profound pity for his old friend's daughter, and had come down out of the clouds long enough to express it in scholarly terms and to offer any assistance in his power. They met sometimes on the stairs and in the dreary parlor, and his eyes beamed with such a friendly light upon her over the top of his spectacles that she began to tell him her small troubles and to ask his advice in a manner which sometimes completely took his breath away. He had never had a sister, his mother died before his remembrance, and he had been brought up by two elderly aunts. Fancy, then, his consternation when he was suddenly and beseechingly asked, "Oh, Professor Silex, would you get a little felt bonnet, if you were me, or one of those lovely wide-brimmed beaver hats? The hats are a dollar more; but they are so lovely and so becoming!"

"My dear child," stammered the professor, "have you no female friend with whom you can consult? I am profoundly ignorant. Miss Eldridge-"

"She says to get the felt," pouted the dear child; "just because it's cheaper. And papa used always to advise me, when I asked him, to get what I liked best." The blue eyes filled, as they still did at the mention of her father.

"My dear," said the professor hurriedly,-they were standing on the first landing, and he heard the feet of students coming down the stairs,-"I should advise you, by all means, to get the-the one you like best. Excuse my haste, but I-I have a class."

She was wearing the beaver when she next met him, and she beamed with smiles as she called his attention to it. He looked at her more seeingly than he had yet done, and a feeling like a very slight electric shock penetrated his brain.

"See!" she cried gayly. "It is becoming, isn't it?"

"It is, indeed," he answered cordially. "And I should think it would be quite-quite warm,-there is so much of it, and it looks so soft."

"I told Miss Eldridge you advised me to get it," continued she triumphantly, "and she didn't say another word."

The professor was aghast. He felt a warm wave stealing over his face. This must be stopped, and at once. Fancy his class, his brother professors, getting hold of such a rare bit of gossip! But he would not hurt her feelings. She was so young, so innocent, and her frank blue eyes were so like those of his dead friend.

"My child," he said softly, "you honor me by your confidence; but may I-might I ask you, when you seek my advice upon subjects-ah-not congruous to my age and profession, not to repeat the result of our conferences? With thoughtless people it might in some slight measure be considered derogatory to my professional dignity. Not that I think it so," he hastily added. "All that concerns you is of great, of heartfelt interest to me."

"I didn't tell anybody but Miss Eldridge," said the culprit penitently; "and I know she won't repeat it; and I'll never do so any more, if you'll let me come to you with my foolish little troubles. It seems something like having papa again."

Now, why this touching tribute should have irritated the professor who can say? He was startled, shocked, at the irritation, and he strove to banish all trace of it from his voice and manner as he said, gravely and kindly, "Continue to come to me with your troubles, my dear, if I can afford you either help or comfort."

A few days passed, and she waylaid him again. Her pretty face was pale, and her soft yellow hair was pushed back from her forehead, showing the blue veins in her temples.

"I don't know what I shall do," she said, in a troubled voice. "Those children have caught up with me in arithmetic, and by next week they'll be ahead of me; and I feel as if I oughtn't to take Miss Eldridge's money if I can't do all she engaged me for. What would you do if you were me?"

"Could you not prepare yourself by study, and so keep in advance of your little pupils?" he inquired kindly.

"I don't believe I could," she replied despondently. "I tried to do the sums that came next, last night, and they wouldn't come right, all I could do; and I got a headache besides."

"I have an hour to spare," said the professor, pulling out his watch: "perhaps, if you will bring me your book and slate, I can elucidate the rule which is perplexing you."

"Oh, will you really?" she exclaimed, a radiant smile lighting up her troubled face. "I'll bring them right away. How kind, how very kind you are, to bother with my sums, when you have so much Greek in your head!" And, obeying an impulse, as she so often did, she caught his hand in both her own and kissed it heartily. Then she skimmed across the parlor, and he heard her child's voice "lilting lightly up the" stairs as he stood-in a position suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax-works-gazing fixedly at the hand which she had kissed.

"She regards me as a father," he said to himself severely. "Am I going mad? Or becoming childish? No; I am only sixty. But, even if it were possible, it would be base, unmanly, to take advantage of her loneliness, her gratitude. No, I will be firm."

So, when the offending "example" was handed to him, with the above-quoted touching statement as to its total depravity, he looked only at the slate. Gently and patiently, as if to a little child, he pointed out the errors and expounded the rule, amply rewarded by her joyful exclamation, "Oh, I see exactly how it's done, now! You do explain things beautifully. I really think I could have learned a good deal if I'd had a teacher like you when I went to school."

"Come to me whenever your lessons perplex you, my dear," he answered, still looking at the slate; "come freely, as if-as if I were your father."

"Ah, how kind, how good you are to me!" she cried, seizing his slender, wrinkled hand and holding it between her soft palms. "How glad papa must be to know it! It almost seems like having him again. Must you go? Good-night."

And, innocently, as if to her father, she held up her face for a kiss.

The professor turned red, turned pale, hesitated, faltered, and then kissed her reverently on her forehead,-or, if the truth must be told, on her soft, frizzled hair, which, according to the fashion of the day, hung almost over her eyes.

Two evenings in the week after this were devoted to arithmetic. The professor was firm-as a rule; but when her joyous "Oh, I see exactly how it's done, now!" followed his patient reiteration of rules and explanations, how could he help rewarding himself by a glance at the glowing face? how could he keep his eyes permanently fixed upon that stony-hearted slate?

So it went on through the winter and spring, till it was nearing the time for the summer vacation. The professor knew only too well that Rosamond had been invited to spend it with some distant cousins,-distant in both senses of the word,-and that on her return she would be swallowed up by the academy and would brighten the dingy boarding-house no more. How could he bear it? His arid, silent life had never had a song in it before. Must the song die out in silence?

When the last evening came, and when, realizing the long separation before them, she once more held up her face for a kiss, with trembling lips and blue eyes swimming in tears, as she told him how she should miss him, how she did not see what she should do without him, his hardly-won firmness was as chaff before the wind. He implored her to marry him; he told her of the beautiful home he would make for her.

"For I am rich, Rosamond," he said hurriedly, before, in her surprise, she could speak. "I have not cared for money, and I believe I have a great deal. You shall do what you will with it, and with me. We will travel: you shall see the Old World, with all its wonders. And I will shield you: you shall never know a trouble or a care that I can take on myself; for-I love you."

Then, as she remained silent, too much astonished to speak, he said beseechingly,-

"You do love me a little? You could not come to me as you do, with all your little cares and perplexities, if you did not: could you?"

"But I came just so to papa," she said, finding voice at last; and her childish face grew perplexed and troubled.

The professor had no answer for that. He hid his face in his hands. In a moment her arms were about his neck, her kisses were falling on his hands.

"You have been so good to me," she cried, "and I am making you unhappy, ungrateful wretch that I am! Of course I love you; of course I will marry you. Take away your hands and look at me-Paul!"

Ah, well! they tell in fairy-stories of the fountain of youth, and even amid the briers of this work-a-day world it is found sometimes, I think, by the divining-rod of Love. But many students gnashed their teeth, and, as we have said, Miss Christina Eldridge alone, of all the dear five hundred, said, "What possessed him?"