If I was troubled or perplexed on any account, Rebecca always seemed to
understand in that quiet, unobtrusive way of hers, and followed my
movements with a grave, restful sympathy in her eyes. On several
occasions I had asked her, playfully, to walk up the lane with me after
school. So it became a matter of course that she should wait for me.
Often we took longer walks, for it was an "open winter," with only one
or two light falls of snow.
Then I believed the "Tempter" came to me, in the form of another
invitation to drive, from Mr. Rollin.
Occupied with my duties in the school-room, one afternoon, I was startled
to observe these characters as suddenly and mysteriously raised as if by
the unseen hand of a modern sibyl on the blackboard:--
"teecher's Bo is a setting On the Fens."
Involuntarily raising my eyes to the window, I was unable to discover on
the fence opposite anything of the nature indicated in those words. I
concluded that the whole was to be taken as one of those deeply
allegorical expressions in which the Wallencamp tongue abounded.
Shortly afterward, a boy who had been playing truant and the Jews' harp
at the same time, in a subdued and melancholy way under the window, and
who had, doubtless, been bribed to undertake his present commission
through some extraordinary means, entered the school-room, and laid on my
desk a note from the auburn-haired fisherman.
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