Since Master Simon’s fields must be tilled by other hands now, and their living therefore had grown less abundant, Margeret had become mistress at the little school, built beyond the meeting-house at the end of a winding lane. It was hard often for her to sit so many hours within doors, listening to the children droning away at their lessons, when she was so used to being in the fresh air the live-long day. She made a good school-mistress, nevertheless, as was proved by the lessons so well learned under her careful eye, although the bundle of birch rods, the former master’s most familiar tool, lay upon its pegs above the door, so little used that a delicate spider web, spun between the tips of its twigs, had hung there the whole year through. The children came laughing and romping down the schoolhouse lane with many a tribute of flowers and red apples for the teacher they loved. One day, a pleasant, growing, Spring day, when she was most impatient to be outside, she had seen the little daughter of Goodwife Page, playing with a long, dusty sunbeam that fell from the high window across her spelling-book. When the child looked up anxiously, fearing reproof, Margeret had only smiled in return and the little girl had gone happily back to her work.
“After all,” Margeret thought, as she looked about her at the fresh, bright faces, “this is only another kind of a garden.”
And often, on summer days, when the air was quiet and the children’s voices filled the room with a busy humming like a hive of bees, she would think of the lives and characters that they were building up for themselves and remember Master Simon’s line:
“The singing masons building roofs of gold.”
There was some one else who came daily down the schoolhouse lane, and waited at the door for lessons to be over. Roger Bardwell, whether it rained or shone, was always there to walk home with the school-mistress and to stay for a few minutes, chatting with Master Simon, when they reached her door. For a year he had been doing so, although the first day of it and the first look of welcome in his blue eyes when he met her coming up the lane, told Margeret that he loved her. But of this he had never spoken, nor ever broken the silence of that mystery as to who he was or whence he had come. What with this silence, and with her other anxieties, the girl had begun to carry a heavy heart as she went about her labours of the day.