When Archie had brought this yarn to her she had laughed so uncontrollably that he was hurt. So, in the hope of finding another such (though Archie had no business to write stories in lesson-time) she said:
"My dear, do show me; I won't laugh."
Archie hesitated; he felt shy about disclosing this sentence he had written, but, on the other hand, Miss Bampton, who appeared to know everything, might help him towards the interpretation.
"Well, it's not a story," he said. "It's just this. I wrote it without knowing. Oh, Miss Bampton, what does it mean, and who is Martin?"
If it was Archie who hesitated before, it was Miss Bampton who hesitated now. Suddenly she had a clever thought.
"My dear, you've been thinking about the Martins that built in the sandpit last spring," she said. "Don't you remember how you and Jeannie made up a story about them?"
This was true enough, but it failed to satisfy Archie. Also he had a notion that Miss Bampton had made a call on her ingenuity in offering this explanation.
"But isn't there any other Martin?" he asked.
"None that you ever knew, Archie," she said. "I think it's one of those in the sandpit. Now get on with your copy, and we'll walk there before your dinner."
The incident passed into the medley of impressions that were crowding so quickly into the storehouse of Archie's consciousness, but it did not lie there quite unconnected with others. He laid it on the same shelf, so to speak, as that which held the memory of his waking vision one night in remote days, and held also the fact of his knowing what Miss Bampton had thought of in the guessing game. But those were among the secret things of which he spoke to nobody. One more impression for secret pondering, though of different sort from those, he had lately added to his store, and that was when a whipping seemed imminent, and he saw one of Miss Schwarz's medicine-bottles standing on his father's table.