Scott nodded. "Just so! Whose hand do you imagine he thought it was?"
"I think we both suspect. But we agreed that suspicion was not enough."
"It is not enough," said Scott, who took his fishing rod from the pegs in the wall of the shack. "Well, shall we go down to the river? The trout ought to rise to-night."
Chapter XIX—A Lost Opportunity
The class-room was very hot and a ray of dazzling sunshine quivered upon the diagrams on the yellow wall. An electric fan hummed monotonously and buzzing flies hovered about Agatha's head. Her face and hands were damp as she stood with knitted brows beside a tall blackboard, looking at the drowsy girls whom she was teaching inorganic chemistry. One or two fixed their eyes on the symbols she had written; the rest had obviously given up the effort to understand the complicated formula. In fact, they did not seem to notice that she had stopped her lecture.
For a few moments she looked about and mused. With one or two exceptions, she liked her pupils, and had led them patiently along the uphill road to knowledge. They had made some progress, but she had lost her delight in leading. For one thing, few would go far, and when they left her the rest would turn aside from the laborious pursuit of science into pleasant human paths and forget all that she had taught while they occupied themselves with the care of husband and children. Moreover, she herself could not follow the climbing road to the heights where the light of knowledge burns brightest, as she once had hoped. When the school term was finished she must turn back and begin again, at the bottom, to direct the faltering steps of another band. But she sometimes wondered whether the beckoning light was not austere and cold.
She glanced at her dress. It was a neutral color and like a uniform. After all, she had physical charm and it was sometimes irksome to wear unbecoming clothes. Then the lofty room, with its varnished desks and benches, looked bleak; her life was passed in bare class-rooms and echoing stone corridors. This would not have mattered had she been able to follow her bent and take the line she had once marked out; but she could not. She must give up the thought of independent research and teach for a living, cramping her talents to meet her pupils' intelligence, until, in time, she sank to their level.
She roused herself with an effort and mechanically resumed her lecture, for her wandering thoughts now dwelt upon the foaming rivers and cool forests of the North. The class-rooms smelt of varnish and throbbed with the monotonous rattle of the fan; in the wilds one breathed the resinous fragrance of the pines and heard the splash of running water. For all that, she must not shirk her duty and she tried to make the meaning of the symbols on the board plainer to the languid girls.