Too, Jerry found the office a most interesting place. No one glanced toward her corner and she could quietly watch everything that happened. And on the second day Uncle Johnny "happened"—in a breezy fashion, coming over and pinching her cheek. Uncle Johnny did not know of her disgrace; by tacit agreement not a word of it had been breathed at home. Dr. Caton, annoyed and disapproving, crisply intimated why Jerry was there. Uncle Johnny tried to make his lips look serious but his eyes danced. Over Dr. Caton's bald head he winked at Jerry.
Uncle Johnny had come to Highacres to talk over some plans for an enclosed hockey rink. For various reasons, of which he was utterly unconscious, he was enjoying "mixing" school interests with the demands of his business. He lingered for half an hour in the office, talking, while Jerry watched the back of his brown head and broad shoulders. Before leaving he walked over to her corner.
"My dear child," he began in a severe tone. He leaned over Jerry so that Dr. Caton could not hear what he said. A trustee had privileges!
"I wouldn't give a cent for a colt that never kicked over the traces!" Which, if Jerry had really been guilty of any offence, would have been very demoralizing. But she was not and she watched Uncle Johnny go out of the room with a look of adoration in her eyes.
A sense of reward came to Jerry, too, when Ginny Cox returned to school. Having fully recovered from the funk that had laid her, shivering and feverish, in bed, that first day she came back in gayer spirits than ever, declaring to many that she thought Miss Gray a "pill" to make such a fuss over just a little joke and, to a few, that it was fine in Jerry to shoulder the blame so that she might play in the game against South High. But her gaiety covered the first real embarrassment she had ever suffered, for Ginny, who had always, because of her peculiar charm, coming from a sense of humor, a hail-fellow spirit, an invariable geniality and an amazing facility in all athletics, exacted a slavish devotion from her schoolmates, and was accustomed to dispense favors among them, hated now to accept, even from Jerry, a very, very great one! And Jerry sensed the humility that this embarrassment called into being.
Ginny waylaid Jerry going home from school. Jerry was carefully living up to the terms of her "sentence"; each day, directly after the close of school, she walked home alone.
"Jerry, I—I haven't had a chance to tell you—oh, what a peach you are," Ginny's words came awkwardly; she knew that they did not in any way express what she ought to be saying.
Jerry did not want Ginny's gratitude. She answered honestly: "I didn't want to do it. I had to—I drew the unlucky slip, you see. And you were needed on the team."
"It's all so mixed up and not a bit right. Can I walk along with you? Who'd ever have thought that just building that silly snow-woman would have made all this fuss!"
"Dr. Caton says thoughtlessness always breeds inconsiderateness and inconsiderateness develops selfishness, selfishness undermines good fellowship and good fellowship is the foundation of the spirit of Lincoln," quoted Jerry in a voice so exactly like Dr. Caton's that both girls laughed.