"Oh, you can draw your cart along to school yourself, very well," said Rodolphus, and so saying, he lifted Annie hastily and roughly out of the cart, calling out at the same time to the boys to wait a minute for him. He put the handle, which was at the end of the tongue of the cart, into Annie's hand, and then ran down to the water; and thus, almost before Annie had time to recover from her astonishment, she found herself left alone in the road, while the boat, with Rodolphus and the other boys in it, began slowly to recede from the shore.
Annie began to cry. Rodolphus called out to her in a rough voice to go along to school. So she began to walk slowly along, drawing the cart wearily after her.
On her way home from school that day, when she came to the place in the road where Rodolphus had left her in the morning, she found him waiting there for her. She was coming without the cart. Rodolphus asked her what she had done with it. She said that she had left it at school. The teacher had told her that it was too heavy for her to draw, and had put it in a corner, to wait till Rodolphus came. Rodolphus then told Annie to sit down upon a stone by the side of the road till he came back, and then began to run toward the school-house. In a short time he came back bringing the cart. He put Annie into it and went toward home.
Annie asked him where he had been all the day—but he did not answer. He seemed discontented and uneasy, and preserved a moody silence all the way home, except that once he turned and charged Annie not to tell his mother or Ellen that he had not been at school that day. When he reached home, he left the cart at the door, and stepping into the entry he began to call out aloud,
"Mother! Mother!"
Ellen came to the door and said in a gentle voice,
"Mother can't come now, Rolfy; she is busy."
"But I want to see her a minute," said he. "Mother! Mother!"
A moment afterward his mother appeared at her bedroom window.
"What do you want, Rolfy?" said she.