Chapter 13

"I am a schoolmistress in a Durham village, with a permanent trustee vote, and an endowment, and no fortune, and no family of consequence." She said this with the directness she brought to all propositions, the refusal to make either more or less of something than it was. "The distance is real. I said so in September.""You did," he said. "And I told you the distance had not altered my intention. It has not.""You came here to close this school," she said again."Yes.""And stayed.""Yes.""Because of Thomas Buley's candle?""That was the beginning of it," he said. "It was not the reason for the last three months."She looked at him across the desk in the November office, with the endowment document between them, and he looked back with the full attention he had been giving to this room and this woman for three months. And outside, the children were arriving for the morning session, and their voices were audible through the stone walls."I have a question," she said."Yes?""When you read the composition books," she said, "in September, the first afternoon... you stayed in this office for an hour.""Yes.""Which ones did you read?"He knew this answer precisely. "Thomas Buley's first. Then Nell Hartley's. Then a girl named Sarah Peele, who had written about her grandmother's death in a way that was very exact. Then a boy named James Carr, who had written about wanting to be a doctor. Then, at the end, the one at the bottom of the stack, which had no name on the cover, and which I took to be a student's until I read the handwriting." He held her gaze. "It was yours."

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He Came to Close Her School — But She Opened His Heart