“I do not know my date of birth, year, month and day; I do not know my father’s name and occupation, and I never went to school before,” she replied in tones sharpened by fright, so that they rang through the crowded school-room, causing an audible gasp of astonishment.
“Why, I was certainly told that you belonged here,” wondered Miss Morrison; then, with ready tact divining something of the girl’s embarrassment:
“Never mind about the questions just now. This is our lesson for to-day; look it over, please, and be prepared to stand and read when I call upon you.”
This Stella could do, and knew she could. Abundant time was given to recover herself; then the paragraph assigned was read, if somewhat slowly and with the faintest trace of foreign accent, yet distinctly, and with more delicacy of modulation than perhaps any other in that room could command.
“Very good, indeed,” approved Miss Morrison; and this time the slight buzz sounded almost like encouragement, and the pricking and tingling were less agonizing than before.
When the others passed out at recess, Stella remained in her seat at a sign from the teacher, who sat down beside her and bent her violet-scented brown head sympathetically toward her singular but far from unattractive new pupil.
“About the age, dear,” she began, tentatively, “surely you must know…”
“I am supposed to be thirteen years old, Miss Morrison, but I have not any birthday. Mother—I mean Mrs. Waring—always makes me a birthday cake on the nineteenth of February, because she says it is so sort of lonesome not to have a birthday. But I do not know really, so of course I could not put it down on the paper. You see, I … I was found! I never heard my father’s name or my mother’s name either—nobody knows who they were.”
Here the clear voice got somehow muffled, and the warm-hearted teacher hastily assured her that it didn’t matter one bit about the questions—she had had no idea—and impulsively she took the hated paper out of the little girl’s sensitive brown hand.
It might have been as well if Lucy Waring had explained matters somewhat before her abrupt departure; but the truth was that she had strung her difficult courage to the necessary point of leaving the child to her own resources in this strange, and possibly unfriendly, new environment. The effort had carried her to a really unnecessary extreme; she had forgotten that Yellow Star’s personal history was as yet quite unknown in Laurel.