"Your Aunt Maria sent me out to look if you were coming. It's time to eat. Been to the store, ain't?"

"Yes, pop. I went alone."

"So? Why, you're getting a big girl, now you can go to Greenwald alone."

"Ach," she laughed. "Why, it's just straight road."

They crossed the porch and entered the kitchen hand-in-hand, the sunbonneted little girl and the big farmer. Jacob Metz was also a member of the Church of the Brethren and bore the distinctive mark: hair parted in the middle and combed straight back over his ears and cut so that the edge of it almost touched his collar. A heavy black beard concealed his chin, mild brown eyes gleamed beneath a pair of heavy black brows. Only in the wide, high forehead and the resolute mouth could be seen any resemblance between him and the fair child by his side.

When they entered the kitchen Maria Metz turned from the stove, where she had been stirring the contents of a big iron pan.

"So you got back safe, after all, Phœbe," she said with a sigh of relief. "I was afraid mebbe something happened to you, with so many streets to go across and so many teams all the time and the automobiles."

"Ach, I look both ways still before I start over. Granny Hogendobler said she'll get out early."

"So. What did she have to say?"

"Ach, lots. She showed me her flowers. Ain't it too bad, now, that her little girl died and her boy went away?"

"Well, she spoiled that boy. He grew up to be not much account if he stays away just because he and his pop had words once."

"But he'll come back some day. Granny knows he will." The child echoed the old mother's confidence.

"Not much chance of that," said Aunt Maria with her usual decisiveness. "When a man goes off like that he mostly always stays off. He writes to her she says and I guess she's just as good off with that as if he come home to live. She's lived this long without him."

"But," argued Phœbe, the maternal in her over-sweeping all else, "he's her boy and she wants him back!"

"Ach," the aunt said impatiently, "you talk too much. Were you at the store?"

"Yes. I got the thread and ordered the sugar and counted the change and there was nothing in the post-office for us."

"Did you enjoy your trip to town?" asked the father.

"Yes—but——"

"But what?" demanded Aunt Maria. "Did you break anything in the store now?"

"No. I just got mad. It was this way"—and she told the story of her pink rose.

Maria Metz frowned. "David Eby should leave his mom's roses on the stalks where they belong. Anyhow, I guess you did look funny if you poked your nose in it like you do still here."

"But she had no business to laugh at me, had she, pop?"

"You're too touchy," he said kindly. "But did you say the lady was on Mollie Stern's porch?"

"Yes."

"Then I guess it was her cousin from Philadelphia, the one that was elected to teach the school on the hill for next winter."

"Oh, pop, not our school?"

"Yes. Anyhow, her cousin was elected yesterday to teach your school. It seems she wanted to teach in the country and Mollie's pop is friends with a lot of our directors and they voted her in."

"I ain't goin' to school then!" Phœbe almost sobbed. "I don't like her, I don't want to go to her school; she laughed at me."

"Come, come," the father laid his hands on her head and spoke gently yet in a tone that she respected. "You mustn't get worked up over it. She's a nice young lady, and it will be something new to have a teacher from Philadelphia. Anyhow, it's a long ways yet till school begins."

"I'm glad it is."

"Come," interrupted the aunt, "help now to dish up. It's time to eat once. We're Pennsylvania Dutch, so what's the use gettin' cross when we're called that?"

"Yes," Phœbe's father said, smiling, "I'm a Dutchie too, but I'm a big Dutchie."

Phœbe smiled, but all through the meal and during the days that followed she thought often of the rose. Her heart was bitter toward the new teacher and she resolved never, never to like her!