The room was unbearably stuffy. The prize-giving was at an end. Miriam’s own children had struggled to the table and come back to her for the last time.
Miss Perne was making a little speech ... about Miss Henderson’s forthcoming departure. Why did people do these formal things? She would be expected to make some response. For a moment she had the impulse to get up and rush away through the hall, get upstairs and pack and send for a four-wheeler. But from behind came hands dragging at a fold of her dress and the sound of Burra’s hard sobbing. She felt the child’s head bowed against her hip. A child at her side twisted its hands together and sat with its head held high, drawing sharp breaths. Miss Perne’s voice went on. She was holding up an umbrella, a terrible, expensive, silver-mounted one. The girls had subscribed.
Miriam sat with beating heart waiting for Miss Perne’s voice to cease, pressing back towards the support of Burra and other little outstretched clutchings and the general snuffling of her class, grappling with the amazement of hearing from various quarters of the room violent and repeated nose-blowings, and away near the door in the voice of a girl she had hardly spoken to a deep heavy contralto sobbing.
Presently she was on her feet with the tightly-rolled silken twist of the umbrella heavy in her hands. Her stiff lips murmured incoherent thanks in a strange thin voice—Harriett’s voice with the life gone from it.
Note.—A further instalment of this book is in preparation.
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A New Series of Plays by present-day English playwrights, also translations of the dramatists of the Continent. Including the dramatic work of
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