Unhappily, all this
gratitude was unconscious and altogether different from the kind which,
results in testimonials and loving-cups. On the contrary!
"Penrod Schofield!"
He gulped.
"Answer me at once! Why did you speak to me like that?"
"I was----" He choked, unable to continue.
"Speak out!"
"I was just--thinking," he managed to stammer.
"That will not do," she returned sharply. "I wish to know immediately
why you spoke as you did."
The stricken Penrod answered helplessly:
"Because I was just thinking."
Upon the very rack he could have offered no ampler truthful explanation.
It was all he knew about it.
"Thinking what?"
"Just thinking."
Miss Spence's expression gave evidence that her power of self-restraint
was undergoing a remarkable test. However, after taking counsel with
herself, she commanded:
"Come here!"
He shuffled forward, and she placed a chair upon the platform near her
own.
"Sit there!"
Then (but not at all as if nothing had happened), she continued the
lesson in arithmetic. Spiritually the children may have learned a lesson
in very small fractions indeed as they gazed at the fragment of
sin before them on the stool of penitence. They all stared at him
attentively with hard and passionately interested eyes, in which there
was never one trace of pity. It cannot be said with precision that he
writhed; his movement was more a slow, continuous squirm, effected with
a ghastly assumption of languid indifference; while his gaze, in the
effort to escape the marble-hearted glare of his schoolmates, affixed
itself with apparent permanence to the waistcoat button of James Russell
Lowell just above the "U" in "Russell.
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