For her benefit he would show feats of strength which might have done credit to a boy-Hercules; but let her turn on him the glow of her countenance, and he was a hopeless mass of perspiring idiocy.
Keith found her a somewhat difficult pupil to deal with.

She was much more intent on making an impression on him than on progressing in her studies.
After the first shyness of her intercourse with the young teacher had worn off, she began for a while rather to make eyes at him, which if Keith ever dreamed of, he never gave the least sign of it.

She, therefore, soon abandoned the useless campaign, and for a time held him in mingled awe and disdain.
The Ridge College was a simple log-building of a single room, with a small porch in front, built of hewn logs and plastered inside.
Gordon Keith, on entering on his new duties, found his position much easier than he had been led to expect.
Whether it was the novelty of the young teacher's quiet manner, clear eyes, broad shoulders, and assured bearing, or the idea of the examination with which he undertook to begin the session, he had a week of surprising quiet.

The school filled day after day, and even the noted Dennison boys, from Jacob Dennison, the strapping six-foot senior, down to Dave, who was the youngest and smartest of the three, appeared duly every morning, and treated the young teacher with reasonable civility, if with somewhat insolent familiarity.
The day of the examination Squire Rawson attended, solemn and pompous with a superfluity of white shirt-front.

Brief as was the examination, it revealed to Keith an astonishing state of ignorance of the simplest things.