Keith instinctively raised his head to look at the place which Dahlin had occupied that very morning. What did it mean ...?
At that moment the Rector entered, long overdue to give them an hour in Latin--an hour of which a goodly part already was gone. The boys dropped into their seats. A murmur of expectation passed through the class. Every eye was on the Rector's face which seemed to twitch in a peculiar fashion.
"The school has suffered a terrible loss," he said at last, his voice sounding very hoarse. "There is only one thing we can do--work! Will primus please begin translating from the top of the twenty-second page, where we left off yesterday."
The boys stared at him, but no one dared to speak. They knew there was no escape, and they tried to fix their attention on the books. Keith saw before him a blurred page full of dancing letters. Primus stumbled and blundered. He was followed by secundus and tertius. Keith had recovered a little by that time, and he knew they were making mistakes that ordinarily would have called forth a storm of reproof from the Rector. Now he paid no attention, but merely repeated:
"Go on--go on!"
At last the lesson came to an end, and then they were dismissed for the day.
On his way home Keith's thoughts ran in a futile circle around the day's event. If they had never left the rink ... if they had been saved ... if the story about Dahlin could have been true....
Always his thoughts returned to the same point: the strangeness of the fact that those boys would never appear again. At no moment, however, did it occur to him that the same thing might have happened to himself--or might happen some time in the future. He was Keith Wellander, to whom such things never happened.
He was nearly home when he suddenly stopped in the middle of East Long Street and said to himself:
"Now I suppose I'll never get leave to go skating again."