'Trouble? what trouble?'
'Oh, it was hardly trouble—at least, I couldn’t tell myself.'
'David is so hard to understand sometimes,' his father said.
'Oh, I don’t think so!' the teacher cried. 'Not when you make friends with him. He doesn’t say much, it’s true, but his heart is like a crystal.'
'He’s too still,' the mother insisted, shaking her head. 'All the time he’s sick, he don’t say anything, only when we ask him something. The doctor thinks he’s worrying about something, but he don’t tell.'
The mother sighed, but Miss Ralston cut short her reflections.
'Mrs. Rudinsky—Mr. Rudinsky,' she began eagerly, 'I can tell you what David’s troubled about.'
And she told them the story of her last talk with David, and finally read them his note.
'And this lie,' she ended, 'you know what it is, don’t you? You’ve just told me yourself, Mr. Rudinsky.'
She looked pleadingly at him, longing to have him understand David’s mind as she understood it. But Mr. Rudinsky was very slow to grasp the point.