"So did I! but not so much as the girl next door to me. My! she must have cried about all night, I should think. I woke up two or three times, and she was crying every time, and I heard her sniffing in her bath this morning."
"Why didn't you go in and try to cheer her up?" demanded Peggy, rather fiercely.
Rose Barclay stared. "Oh, I couldn't do that! why, I've never spoken to her; it was that queer little piece that sat next to you. Besides, she looks as if she'd die if any one spoke to her."
The school was called to order, and Peggy soon forgot homesickness and everything else in the keen joy of mathematics.
She had chosen the scientific course—there were three courses in the school—in order to get as much of practical and as little of literary knowledge as might be. Geometry was her delight, and it was geometry over which she was bending now.
Most of the teachers at Pentland School expected little of the new pupil from Ohio. The written examinations that Peggy had passed had caused many a head-shaking. The history teacher sighed; the gentle mistress of English literature groaned, and said, "Why must this child come here?" Only Miss Boyle, the mistress of mathematics, had nodded her head over the papers. "Here's a girl who knows what she is about!" she said. Accordingly, when Peggy entered class this morning, she was surprised at the cordial greeting she received from the bright-eyed lady at the central desk; and an indefinable sense of being at home and among friends stole gradually over her, as she wrestled with one delightful problem after another.
Rose Barclay, at her side, was biting her pencil and twisting her pretty forehead into hard knots, and making little progress; but Peggy had forgotten her existence. The period passed like a moment, as theorem after theorem was disposed of.
"Let EDF and BAC be two triangles, having the angle E equal to the angle B, the angle F to the angle C, and the included side EF to the included side BC; then will the triangle EDF be equal to the triangle BAC?"
"Of course it will!" Peggy drew triangles in swift and accurate demonstration. "Put the side EF on its equal BC, and let the point E fall on B, and the point F on C. Then, you see, of course—"
"I don't see how any one is ever to do this!" murmured her neighbour, in despair. "Why! why, you've done yours. Oh, just let me see, won't you? I never can work it out in the world, so do let me copy yours!"