you, but, by gad, I think hereafter you’d better give up those extra arithmetic problems in the afternoon and draw pictures.”
Whereupon Garrett Marshall went home and told his father that “old Carpenter” wasn’t fair and “made favourites” over Teddy Kent.
Mr. Carpenter went up to the Tansy Patch that evening and saw the sketches in Teddy’s old barn-loft studio. Then he went into the house and talked to Mrs. Kent. What he said and what she said nobody ever knew. But Mr. Carpenter went away looking grim, as if he had met an unexpected match. He took great pains with Teddy’s general school work after that and procured from somewhere certain elementary text books on drawing which he gave him, telling him not to take them home—a caution Teddy did not require. He knew quite well that if he did they would disappear as mysteriously as his cats had done. He had taken Emily’s advice and told his mother he would not love her if anything happened to Leo, and Leo flourished and waxed fat and doggy. But Teddy was too gentle at heart and too fond of his mother to make such a threat more than once. He knew she had cried all that night after Mr. Carpenter had been there, and prayed on her knees in her little bedroom most of the next day, and looked at him with bitter, haunting eyes for a week. He wished she were more like other fellows’ mothers but they loved each other very much and had dear hours together in the little grey house on the tansy hill. It was only when other people were about that Mrs. Kent was queer and jealous.
“She’s always lovely when we’re alone,” Teddy had told Emily.
As for the other boys, Perry Miller was the only one Mr. Carpenter bothered much with in the way of speeches—and he was as merciless with him as with Ilse. Perry worked hard to please him and practiced his speeches in barn and field—and even by nights in the kitchen loft—
