“I—I don’t think I could study to-night,” said Jack, who felt quite miserable with his enforced detention in the house, and the unpleasant news concerning his parents. “I’d be thinking so much about my father and mother that I couldn’t keep my attention on the verbs,” he said.
“That indicates a weak intellect,” returned the professor. “You should labor to overcome it. However, perhaps it would be useless to have you do any Latin to-night. But I must insist on you improving in your studies. Your last report from the academy was very poor.”
Jack did not answer. With a heavy heart he went to his room, where he sat for some time in the dark, thinking of his parents in far-off China.
“I wish I could go and find them,” he said. “Maybe they need help. I wonder if the professor’d let me go?”
But, even as that idea came to him, he knew it would be useless to propose it to Mr. Klopper.
“He’s got enough of money that dad left for my keep, to pay my passage,” the boy mused on. “But if I asked for some for a steamship ticket he’d begin to figure what the interest on it for a hundred years would be, and then he’d lecture me about being a spendthrift. No, I’ll have to let it go, though I do wish I could make a trip abroad. If I could only earn money enough, some way, I’d go to China and find dad and mom.”
But even disquieting and sad thoughts can not long keep awake a healthy lad, and soon Jack was slumbering. He was up early the next morning, and, as usual, accompanied the professor to church.
The best part of the afternoon he was forced to spend in reading a book on what boys ought to do, written by an old man who, if ever he was a healthy, sport-loving lad, must have been one so many years ago that he forgot that he ever liked to have fun once in a while.
Jack was glad when night came, so he could go to bed again.
“To-morrow I’ll see the boys,” he thought to himself. “They’ll want to know why I didn’t come to play ball, and I’ll have to tell them the real reason. I’m getting so I hate Professor Klopper!”