"I'll dress him for you," Jane Cotton's Sam said eagerly, "and bring him over in the morning in plenty o' time."
"Thank you," Loraine said heartily. "Now you'll have to let me do something for you. 'Turn about is fair play.' Couldn't I—" She hesitated, looking out over the still reddened water rather than at the boy's face. "Couldn't I help you in some way with your studies? That's my business, you know. It would really be doing me a kindness, for I may get all out of practice unless I teach somebody something!" Had Loraine, too, forgotten the Compact on the screen door?
The boy fidgeted, then burst out angrily: "I s'pose they've all been telling you I failed up in my exams? They have, haven't they? You knew it, didn't you?"
"Yes," Loraine answered quietly. "But I've heard a good many worse things in my life. I've heard of boys that smoked and drank and—and stole. What does missing a few examinations amount to beside things like those?" But the boy did not seem to have been listening to anything except his own angry thoughts. All his sun-browned young face was flooded with red; he had run his fingers through his hair till it stood up fiercely.
"They needn't trouble themselves 'bout me, nor you needn't, nor anybody needn't!" he declaimed loudly. "Anybody'd think they were saints themselves!"
"And I was a saint and everybody was saints!" laughed Loraine softly. But Jane Cotton's Sam did not laugh. He went striding away into the woods, his head flung up high. Loraine and the little dead fish were left behind. Oddly the girl was not thinking of the boy's rudeness in return for her kind offer of help, but of the flash of spirit in his eyes. It augured well for him, she was thinking, for spirit was spirit, although "gone wrong." In the right place, it should spur him on to a second attempt to get into college. What if she were to persist in her offer—were to work with him, urge him to work with her?
But he had chosen to spurn her advances. She shook her head sadly. On his own head be it. She turned her attention to the little dead fish.
"You poor dear, you look so dead and forlorn—what am I going to do with you? Someway you've got to go home with me and be fried." She took him up gingerly, but dropped him again—he was so slippery and damp! Wrap him in her handkerchief? But she had no pocket and she could never, never carry him in her sleeve which she had adopted as a pocket. So then she must leave him, must she? Poor little useless sacrifice!
Back at the picnic spot the girls were waiting for her. They went home in the late, sweet twilight.
A letter was tucked under the screen door where some friendly neighbor had left it. "Miss Thomasia O. Brown," Billy read aloud, and waved the letter in triumph, for the secret was out. The 'T' in T.O. stood for Thomasia!