“I do,” said Bobbie. “I thought he was trying to explain something to us with his newspaper.”
“Explain what?” asked Peter, not unnaturally.
“I don't know,” Bobbie answered, “but I do feel most awfully funny. I feel just exactly as if something was going to happen.”
“What is going to happen,” said Peter, “is that Phyllis's stocking is going to come down.”
This was but too true. The suspender had given way in the agitation of the waves to the 9.15. Bobbie's handkerchief served as first aid to the injured, and they all went home.
Lessons were more than usually difficult to Bobbie that day. Indeed, she disgraced herself so deeply over a quite simple sum about the division of 48 pounds of meat and 36 pounds of bread among 144 hungry children that Mother looked at her anxiously.
“Don't you feel quite well, dear?” she asked.
“I don't know,” was Bobbie's unexpected answer. “I don't know how I feel. It isn't that I'm lazy. Mother, will you let me off lessons to-day? I feel as if I wanted to be quite alone by myself.”
“Yes, of course I'll let you off,” said Mother; “but—”
Bobbie dropped her slate. It cracked just across the little green mark that is so useful for drawing patterns round, and it was never the same slate again. Without waiting to pick it up she bolted. Mother caught her in the hall feeling blindly among the waterproofs and umbrellas for her garden hat.