“You are?”
“Yes. You’ve helped me, but there’s Bob Holliday. I’ve been helping him, but he’s got to a place where I don’t quite understand the thing myself. Now Bob wouldn’t dare ask you to help him——”
“Bring him along. How the Greenbank Academy grows!” laughed Susan, turning to her father.
Bob was afraid of Susan at first—his large fingers trembled so much that he had trouble to use his slate-pencil. But by the third evening his shyness had worn off, so that he got on well.
One evening, after a week of attendance, he was missing. The next morning he came to Jack’s house with his face scratched and his eye bruised.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jack.
“Well, you see, yesterday I was at the school-house at noon, and Pewee, egged on by Riley, said something he oughtn’t to, about Susan, and I couldn’t stand there and hear that girl made fun of, and so I up and downed him, and made him take it back. I can’t go till my face looks better, you know, for I wouldn’t want her to know anything about it.”
But the professor heard all about it from Joanna, who had it from one of the school-boys. Susan sent Columbus to tell Bob that she knew all about it, and that he must come back to school.
“So you’ve been fighting, have you?” she said, severely, when Bob appeared. The poor fellow was glad she took that tone—if she had thanked him he wouldn’t have been able to reply.