“It’s only just begun!”
“Then I am afraid that I shall have to ask questions, dear.”
“I couldn’t answer them—yet. Please, Grandmother, need I bother with lunch? I’m not hungry.”
But Mrs. Clyde was firm on that point; Blue Bonnet must eat a proper lunch if she wanted to go back to school.
“I don’t want to,” she said, with a little laugh; “only I’ve just got to, or they would think—” Blue Bonnet hurried through her luncheon in a way Aunt Lucinda, had she been there, would hardly have countenanced; but when it was over, she lingered in the garden with Solomon until there was barely time to get back to school.
There, she went straight to her desk, trying not to see the little group gathered about Debby’s seat, and scarcely answering Sarah’s remark about the club-meeting to-morrow.
Sarah would think it was her duty to be just the same as usual, but she didn’t want “duty friendliness.” Good; Miss Fellows was going to ring for order right now.
Blue Bonnet was glad that drawing followed immediately; one didn’t have to answer questions in drawing, and there was a chance to think. Though in this case, thinking only meant going over and over the same old road and winding up each time at the same high, blank wall. Once, glancing up unexpectedly, she found Ruth looking at her in a wonder that was half reproach.
Blue Bonnet dropped her pencil on to the desk and turned to the window. Ruth loved law and order as she did not, and yet Ruth was prepared to act in open defiance of both, in obedience to that intangible something called “class spirit.”
Blue Bonnet stared at the soft, fleecy clouds piling themselves up like great, white snow-drifts. Was she wrong after all?