“Let’s wait and see,” said I; and that night I dreamed that I was a wind-mill, and that every time my sails, which were just the same as arms, went round, they came down bang on Dicksee’s head, and made him yell.
I woke up after that dream, to find it was broad daylight, and crept out of bed to look at my face in the glass, and shrank away aghast, for my lip was more swollen, and there was a nasty dark look under my eye.
Chapter Eight.
I stood gazing into the little looking-glass with my spirits sinking down and down in that dreary way in which they will drop with a boy who wakes up in the morning with some trouble resting upon his shoulders like so much lead.
I was more stiff and sore, too, at first waking, and all this combined to make me feel so miserable, that I began to think about home and my mother, and what would be the consequences if I were to dress quickly, slip out, and go back.
She would be so glad to see me again, I thought, that she would not be cross; and when I told her how miserable I was at the school, she would pity me, and it would be all right again.
I was so elated by the prospect, and—young impostor that I was—so glad of the excuse which the marks upon my face would form to a doting mother, that I began to dress quickly, and had got as far as I could without beginning to splash in the water and rattle the little white jug and basin, when the great obstacle to my evasion came before me with crushing power, and I sat on my bed gazing blankly before me.
For a terrible question had come for an answer, and it was this: