“Oh-h!” moaned Betty Burd dolefully. “If you were saying only ten days more before Betty Burd’s funeral, I wouldn’t feel a bit more dismal about it!”
“Cheer up, little one,” Adele said brightly. “You are getting on famously. Can you spell ‘believe’ to-day?”
“B-e-l-i-e-v-e,” Betty replied with a faint attempt at a smile. “I do believe,” she added with conviction, “that whoever made up the English language tried to tangle the letters in it just as much as possible.”
“Those old sages didn’t know about your pony, Betsy, or they never would have done it,” Bertha Angel gayly remarked, and then the last bell called them to their classes.
This unusual application to her studies at last began to tell on Betty, and as the fatal day drew near she visibly drooped.
“George!” Mrs. Burd exclaimed one morning, when Betty, after having sat listlessly at the table, finally departed for school without having touched her breakfast. “If you do not forbid Betty’s studying so hard, I shall do so myself. She’s all I have left in the world, now that her daddy is gone, and I don’t care if she never, never learns to spell. If you wanted to give her a pony, why didn’t you do so without making her work so hard for it?”
George Wainwright had been unusually busy in his city office of late, and was seldom at the table when Betty was there, and as for the examinations, he had quite forgotten about them. But that night he was home for dinner, and he noticed how pale was the little girl whom he so dearly loved, and when she refused to eat chocolate pudding and whipped cream, her very favorite dessert, then, indeed, did his conscience smite him, and he decided to take the child out of school at once and get the pony, that she might ride and bring the roses back to her cheeks. And so it was that he asked her to walk with him in the garden while he had his after-dinner smoke.
This was always a treat to Betty, and she went with him gladly. After they had walked up and down the gravelly paths a few times, Uncle George asked suddenly, “And how’s the spelling getting on, Betsy Bobbets?”
“Well,” said Betty with a sigh, “I’ve got the ‘i-e’ right at last, and if they will examine me on that I am sure to be perfect; that is, I shall be if it’s a written examination. But, oh, Uncle George, if the principal, Mr. Dickerson, comes in and gives us an oral one, I won’t be able to spell one single word. I get so scared when he asks me a question; something clutches at my throat, and everything turns black before me, and even the words that I know I know, I just don’t know at all.”
Uncle George laughed at the twisted sentence, and then he drew the little girl down on a bench beside him.