The fatal day came at last when I had to go off to my ordeal. I was obliged at the last moment to disclose my well-kept secret to my mother and my guardian. The former fell on my neck, the latter grunted incredulously and embarrassed me by presenting me with a five-shilling piece.
Miss Steele came down to see me off at the station. “Keep cool,” said she; “sit where you can see the clock, and don’t try to answer two questions at once.”
Never did tyro get better advice!
I was too excited to heed much of the big stately building I was so eager some day to claim as my own school. It was holiday time, and only a little band of combatants like myself huddled into one corner of the big hall, and gazed up in an awestruck way at the portrait of the Jacobean knight to whom Low Heath owed its foundation.
To me it was all like a dream. I woke to discover a paper on the desk before me; a paper bristling with questions, each of them challenging me to get into the school if I could. Then I remember dashing my pen into the ink and beginning to write.
“Keep cool. Keep your eye on the clock. Try one question at a time,” echoed a voice in my ear.
How lonely I felt there all by myself! How I wished I could turn and see her at my side!
The clock crawled round from eleven to three, and I went on writing. Then I remember a hand coming along the desk and taking the papers out of my sight. Then a bewildered train journey home, and a hundred questions at the other end.
I went on dreaming for a week, conscious sometimes of my mother’s face, sometimes of Miss Steele’s, sometimes of Mr Evans’s. But what I did with myself in the interval I should be sorry to be called upon to tell.
At last, one morning, I woke with a vengeance, as I held in my hand a paper on which were printed a score or so of names, third among which I made out the words—