"How is it down there? Very bad?"
One would have thought she had accused him of surrender. He turned upon her with fierce irritability.
"Who says we're not getting on?" he demanded. "Who says—who says nothing can do any good?"
He grasped the sides of the chair and struggled to his feet. He stood erect like a general, his eyes suddenly lighting up with the fire of inflexible will. Then he was seized with a trembling fit, and sank back in his chair. He rubbed his hands over his gray face; he clenched his fingers, and the knuckle of his thumb went to his eye and got wet in doing it. And it was all so awkward, and so boyish, and so funny, this movement of his fist and the tear-drop on his thumb, that Miss Eastman would have laughed if she had not been crying.
"Who was it, Doctor—who was it that died to-day?"
He told her who it was, and she could not believe him.
"Jim Lehman's child? Not Emma—surely not little Emma Lehman? How is that possible? Such a very short time ago it seems since I was lending her story-books! She couldn't speak English at all when she first came to school."
"You knew her, then?"
"Knew her? She was the only one who cried when I told them I would not teach school any more. She gave me a present once—a woeful, comical Christmas present, a big, clean-washed, smooth potato. That was all she had to give, and she had tied colored strips of tissue paper about it to make it good enough."
Miss Eastman inquired about other children, one by one, as though calling the roll. At first he evaded her questioning, giving such vague and equivocal replies that presently she clearly understood the situation.