Deborah at school had indeed always been reckoned a dreamer, and one teacher had made her life a species of mild misery by perpetually and unceasingly calling her by that name.
Did she raise her pencil one minute from her work there would come across the class that everlasting voice,—
“Now, Deborah, there you are again! dreaming as usual. Dear me! What a wonderful brain yours must be!”
And the other girls would laugh; but because she had never been able to form a single friendship she could never join in.
When she became a teacher she used often to ponder on these words.
“Well, anyway, I can’t be so bad,” she used to think. “Because if any of these children talk or play or are lazy I know it at once, and if I never did anything else but dream I should never know it at all.”
There was a deal of hard work to be done in those days too.
It was in the days when pupil-teachers taught all day and learnt all night, and went early to school in the morning for an hour’s instruction.
It was about this time that Jack and Deborah became very great friends. The friendship, on her side at least, grew out of gratitude.
There had come to the town some short while before a very great actor, whom for her own reasons she badly wanted to see.