“She may, if they are in different seats tomorrow.”
The zero hour came. Betty looked at the questions on the board. Oh, they weren’t so bad. It was fair. There were the special things that Miss Heath had emphasized, some of the hardest to get, to be sure, but Betty had studied hard and she had freshened up on the vocabulary lists and some of the rules of syntax, for she dreaded the translations, sentences that Miss Heath would make up, some of them at least.
Betty’s cheeks were hot, but she worked away. Mercy, her fountain pen had given out. She took a pencil and found its point blunt. Hastily she traveled to the pencil sharpener and put on it as sharp a point as possible. Miss Heath did not want them to use pencil for examinations if it were not necessary; but this wasn’t the semester final, when Carolyn said you had to use ink, they said. But she’d better sharpen two pencils, perhaps.
Betty scarcely saw the rest of the scholars as she returned to her desk for another pencil, so absorbed was she in thoughts of the examination questions. There was a whisking of something on several desks as she and some one else passed down parallel aisles at the same time, she to return, the other to go to the pencil sharpener. As she sat down and looked off thoughtfully at the board, the teacher was looking in her direction and two of the boys were chuckling behind her.
The teacher rapped for order and Betty, turning, caught a glimpse of Peggy, who was looking daggers at somebody behind Betty. But Betty was finishing her paper. The time was nearly up. She read over what she had, put in a long mark over a vowel in one of the declensions, looked for other omissions or mistakes, and puzzled over her last English to Latin sentence. She hoped it was right. There went the bell. Betty made ready her paper. Now it was handed in. Now they were in the hall. The test was over. What a relief!
“Did you see what those boys were doing?” asked Peggy, as Betty and Carolyn caught up with her at the door of the room where they were entering for another class.
“No, what was it?” questioned Carolyn, but the teacher just then beckoned Betty, to give her back a paper that she had failed to return with the rest given out to the class, and Betty missed Peggy’s reply.
“That was a very good paper, Betty,” said her teacher. “I found it with some sophomore papers where it had gotten by mistake.”
Betty was disappointed to find only an eighty-eight for her grade, but she knew that anything over eighty was good with Miss Smith. Tests were popular just now at Lyon High. All too soon would come the semester finals!