"Well, Boy," she said, kissing the truant.
"I'm not going back," panted the girl. Her spirit fluttered furiously as that of an escaped bird who fears recapture.
"I'm not going to send you back, my dear," replied the mother.
The girl put her arms about her mother's neck in a moment of rare impulse.
"Oh, mother!" she sighed.
She did not cry: Boy Woodburn was never known to cry. She did not faint. She very rarely fainted. But she trembled through and through.
Mrs. Woodburn paid the necessary fees. The schoolmistress didn't ask to have the girl back. She admitted that she could make nothing of her.
"Stuck her toes in," said Old Mat. "And I don't blame her. Can't see Boy walkin' out two be two, and hand in hand." He shook his head. "Mustn't put a blood filly in the cart, Mar," he said. "She'll only kick the caboodlum to pieces."
Mrs. Woodburn made one more effort to educate her daughter on conventional lines. She introduced a governess to Putnam's. But after the girl had taken her mistress for a ride, the poor woman came to Mrs. Woodburn in tears and asked to leave.
"I can't teach her the irregular verbs on horseback," she said. "And she won't learn any other way. Directly I begin on them, she starts to gallop."