Billy gazed down on her with tender eyes, his heart beating faster with a manly, protecting feeling new to him
He hurried off, hoping to meet Erminie in the halls before she went to her class-room; but she was barely prompt, passing him as the bell rang, with a hasty nod. Billy thought it cool, till he saw that Walter Buckman was right behind her.
The hours droned by, seemingly interminable. Automatically he went from class to class. Twice he had to be reminded that the bell had tapped. In the midst of defining the powers of the Constitution of the United States of America, he saw a picture of a little house with a vine over it, and Erminie sitting in the tiny living-room. And while walking down the hall to his German Class he built still other castles, followed impossible adventures that involved Erminie, himself, and two other men who wanted her; and vanquished them both just at the moment his teacher said, “Guten Morgen, Herr Bennett.”
Yet as the day proceeded, he had to wake to his many duties. At the noon recess he was besieged by boys asking of the meeting to be addressed in the assembly-room by Mr. Streeter, its importance, and if they could not go would he tell them all about it later? And the girls appealed to him to know if they were really invited. A delayed English exercise had to be copied; and at the moment—hoped for, watched for—when Erminie went down the main hall on her way back from luncheon, a teacher was explaining to Billy some stubbornly hidden point in his geometry.
Two o’clock came finally, and Billy, waiting till the last moment, hoping vainly to see Erminie, went to the assembly-room, where a crowd of noisy boys waited for Mr. Streeter’s coming.
“Who is he, anyway?” asked a boy new to the city and the school.
“He’s the best, jolliest ever,” Billy answered. “They say he’s never grown up and never will. But the boys like him that way, and the fathers and mothers trust him to the limit.”
“What does he do?”
“For a living? Nothing now. He’s had a fortune come to him, ten times as much a year as he used to earn.”