Then one afternoon her pupil failed to appear, and Peggy wondered. A second afternoon brought neither Lucy nor an explanation of her absence. “I’m afraid she’s sick,” said Peggy, who never thought of a discreditable explanation for anything till there was no help for it.
“Sick of algebra, more likely,” suggested Claire. “I thought such zeal wouldn’t last.”
“She doesn’t seem like that sort of a girl,” declared Amy, who was developing a tendency to disagree with Claire on every possible pretext. “She’s one of the stickers, or I don’t know one when I see it.”
A little assenting murmur went the rounds, and Claire glanced reproachfully at Priscilla, who had sided against her. “Two souls with but a single thought,” represented Claire’s ideal of friendship. That two people could love each other devotedly, and yet disagree on a variety of subjects, was beyond her comprehension. She was ready at a moment’s notice to cast aside her personal convictions, and agree with Priscilla, whatever stand the latter cared to take, and it seemed hard, in view of such unquestioning loyalty, that Priscilla should persist in having opinions of her own.
But Claire’s hour of triumph was on its way. When Jerry Morton came in the morning with a string of freshly caught fish, he produced from the depths of an over-worked pocket a folded paper, which, to judge from its worn and soiled appearance, had served as a hair-curler or in some equally trying capacity. This he handed to Peggy, who regarded it with natural misgiving.
“That Haines girl sent it,” Jerry explained. “I put it in the pocket where I carry the bait, but I guess the inside is all right.”
Thus encouraged, Peggy unfolded the dingy scrap, but the changes of her expressive face did not bear out Jerry’s optimistic conjecture that the “inside” was all right. Judging from Peggy’s crestfallen air, it was all wrong. The note was not written in Lucy’s usual regular hand. The letters straggled, the lines zig-zagged across the page, and the name signed was almost an unintelligible scrawl. But Peggy thought less of these superficial matters than of the unwelcome news communicated.
“Dear Friend:–I shan’t come to study algebra any more. I’ve given up the idea of going to school any longer. I thank you very much for trying to help me, but it’s no use.
“Yours truly,
“Lucy Haines.”
“I thought it was something like that,” Claire remarked triumphantly when the note was read aloud, and she reflected with some satisfaction that she alone had suggested the rightful explanation of Lucy’s action.