Johnny’s face cleared a little.
“Look out you don’t choke, Jim,” he said, briskly, and, with a nod by way of good morning, began to run, to make up for lost time.
He barely did it, and he felt that he was looking red and breathless, while everybody else had a particularly cool and comfortable expression—“as if they’d been here a week!” he grumbled to himself.
Things went on in this style all day. He nearly quarrelled with one of his best friends, at recess, about such a mere trifle that he was ashamed to remember it, afterward. His sums “came wrong”; he lost a place in one of his classes; he tripped and tumbled, scattering his books again, just as he was starting for home; the stationery store was entirely out of book straps, and although the polite stationer promised to have a very superior one, direct from the saddle-and-harness-maker’s, by the next afternoon, at latest, Johnny was not consoled.
So, altogether, he came home in a rather worse humor than that in which he had gone away, and although, fortunately, nothing happened to cause an explosion, he certainly did not add to the general happiness at the tea table. He studied his lessons in silence, for the half hour after tea which was all the evening time he was allowed for study, and then took up a book in which he had been very much interested, but it seemed suddenly to have turned dull, and he rose with unusual promptness, when the clock struck nine, and bade his father good night. His good night to his mother came later, when he was snugly in bed.
“Don’t you feel well to-night, my boy?” asked Mr. Leslie, laying a kind hand on Johnny’s head, as he spoke.
“Oh, yes, papa, I’m all right, I suppose,” replied Johnny, soberly, “but it just seems as if everything had gone sort of upside down, to-day, somehow!”
“Will you allow me to try a simple and comparatively painless experiment upon you, John?”
Mr. Leslie spoke very seriously, but there was a twinkle in his eye which Johnny well knew meant mischief. It meant fun, too, though, and Johnny replied with equal gravity,—
“Certainly, papa, unless it is very painful.”