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Updated: June 15, 2025
Walter Fairchilds was the protege of his uncle, the High Church bishop of a New England State, who had practically, though not legally, adopted him, upon the death of his father, when the boy was fourteen years old, his mother having died at his birth. It was tacitly understood by Walter that his uncle was educating him for the priesthood.
Do you understand?" said Fairchilds, coolly, as he let go his hold on the youth and stepped round to his side. Absalom's face turned white with fury as he realized who had dared to interfere. He opened his lips, but speech would not come to him. Clenching his fingers, he drew back his arm, but his heavy fist, coming swiftly forward, was caught easily in Fairchilds's palm and held there.
Forming a semicircle in the open air, the exercises were opened by a song, 'O my Country, sung by clear r-r-ringing childish voices...." It was the last item on the program, and by mutual and silent consent, Tillie and Fairchilds, at the first stir of the audience, slipped out of the schoolhouse together. Tillie's father was in the audience, and so was Absalom.
But for the sake of the cause, she said to herself, she would conquer her repugnance and bear it. For two weeks after Tillie's return home, she did not once have a word alone with Fairchilds. He came several times, ostensibly on errands from her aunt; but on each occasion he found her hard at work in her father's presence.
Now Tillie knew that if she allowed Absalom Puntz to leave her in his present state of baffled anger, Fairchilds would not remain in New Canaan a month. Absalom was his father's only child, and Nathaniel Puntz was known to be both suspicious and vindictive. "Clothed in a little brief authority," as school director, he never missed an opportunity to wield his precious power.
"Do it, Tillie!" cried Fairchilds, stepping after them across the store. "Present your resignation before they have a chance to vote you out! Do it!" he said eagerly. Tillie looked from one to the other of the two men before her, excitement sparkling in her eyes, her breath coming short and fast. "I will!" Turning away, she ran down the steps, sped across the street, and disappeared in the hotel.
"And the directors is most all Mennonites and Amish and Dunkards. All them is PLAIN churches and loosed of the world, you know." "Oh, well, I'll wriggle out somehow! Trust to luck!" Fairchilds dismissed the subject, realizing the injudiciousness of being too confidential with this girl on so short an acquaintance. At the momentous hour of seven, the directors promptly assembled.
"Levi Harnish, he's a learnt preacher," said her husband, turning to Fairchilds. "He reads wonderful much. And he's always thinkin' so earnest about his learnin' that I've saw him walk along the street in Lancaster a'ready and a'most walk into people!" "He certainly can stand on the pulpit elegant!" agreed Mrs. Wackernagel. "Why, he can preach his whole sermont with the Bible shut, yet!
The thought cheered him mightily; for his life in New Canaan was heavy with loneliness. With the selfishness natural to man, he did not stop to consider what such companionship might come to mean to this inexperienced girl steeped in a life of sordid labor and unbroken monotony. There came the rustle of Amanda's skirts on the stairs. Fairchilds clasped Tillie's passive hand.
Therefore, when in the course of his career at Harvard, Walter Fairchilds discovered that intellectually he had outgrown not only the social creed of the divine right of the well-born, in which these people had educated him, but their theological creed as well, the necessity of breaking the fact to them, of wounding their affection for him, of disappointing the fond and cherished hope with which for years his uncle had spent money upon his education the ordeal which he had to face was a fiery one.
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