Chapter Seventeen.
Failed!
First Class, Second Class, and still no sign of the familiar number. Third Class—it was not there! Rhoda gave a little gulp, and began again from the very beginning. She had been too quick, too eager. It was so easy to miss a number. One by one she conned them over, but it was not there. The long Pass List lay below, and she looked at it with dreary indifference. To scramble through with the rabble was a sorry attainment, or it seemed so for one moment, but at the next it became, suddenly, a wild, impossible dream, for—the number was not there! No fear of overlooking this time, for the figures stood out as if printed in fire, and burned themselves into her brain. The number was not in the First Class, nor the Second, nor the Third; it was not in the Pass List, it was not mentioned at all.
If she had ever permitted herself to anticipate such a situation, which she had not, Rhoda would have pictured herself flying into a paroxysm of despair; but in reality she felt icy cold, and it was in a tone almost of indifference that she announced:
“I am plucked! I have not passed at all.”
“Never mind, dear; you did your best, and the work matters more than the result. Very uncertain tests, these examinations—I never cared about them,” said her father kindly, and Mrs Chester smiled in her usual placid fashion, and murmured, “Oh, I expect it’s a mistake. It’s so easy to make a mistake in printing figures. You will find it is all right, darling, later on. Have some jam!”
They were absolutely placid; absolutely calm; absolutely unconscious of the storm of emotion raging beneath that quiet exterior; but Harold glanced at his sister with the handsome eyes which looked so sleepy, but which were in reality so remarkably wide-awake, and said slowly:
“I think Rhoda has finished, mother. You don’t want any jam, do you, Ro? Come into the garden with me instead. I want a stroll.”
He walked out through the French window, and Rhoda followed with much the same feeling of relief as that with which a captive escapes from the prison which seems to be on the point of suffocating him, mentally and physically. Brother and sister paced in silence down the path leading to the rose garden. Harold was full of sympathy, but, man-like, found it difficult to put his thoughts into words, and Rhoda, after all, was the first to speak. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the path, and confronted him with shining eyes. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears.