Page:George Weston--The apple-tree girl.djvu/88

 Yes, and I will, too, or know the reason why."

But oh, what a problem—a problem that many a million have vainly tried to figure out since this old world began to wag. If Charlotte had been a talented young man in a great city the sum would have been plenty hard enough—or if she had been a rich and beautiful girl it would have been plenty hard enough. But when you consider her living in that deserted village, a poor little school-ma'am who was about to teach for twenty-five dollars a month; a poor little schoolma'am, moreover, with a nose inclined to be beaky and a chin inclined to be sensitive; why then you can begin to see what sort of a sum it was that she had set herself.

Yet if you had met Charlotte on Thanksgiving afternoon that year, as she strode over the fields above the farm, I don't think you would have quarreled with her appearance. The sun and the