"It's Laura Rambotham, Miss Snodgrass. She's so funny," spluttered the girl.
"What are you doing, Laura?"
Laura did not answer. The girl spoke for her.
"She said—hee, hee!—she said it was blue."
"Blue? What's blue?" snapped Miss Snodgrass.
"That word. She said it was so beautiful ... and that it was blue."
"I didn't. Grey-blue, I said," murmured Laura her cheeks aflame.
The class rocked; even Miss Snodgrass herself had to join in the laugh while she hushed and reproved. And sometimes after this, when a particularly long or odd word occurred in the lesson, she would turn to Laura and say jocosely: "Now, Laura, come on, tell us what colour that is. Red and yellow, don't you think?"
But these were "Tom Fool's colours"; and Laura kept a wise silence.
One day at geography, the pupils were required to copy the outline of the map of England. Laura, about to begin, found to her dismay that she had lost her pencil. To confess the loss meant one of the hard, public rebukes from which she shrank. And so, while the others drew, heads and backs bent low over their desks, she fidgeted and sought—on her [P.72] lap, the bench, the floor.