"Why don't you go out and play with the balance an' limber yourself up?" he asked.
"Play? I say play!" she sighed. "You men don't know any more about what a woman teacher has to contend with than a day-old kitten. My head is in a constant whirl. Sometimes I forget my own name."
"What's wrong now?" Webb smiled eagerly.
"Oh, it's everything—everything!" she sighed. "Not a thing has happened right to-day. George flatly refused to come to school—even defied me before some other boys down the road. Then my own sister—"
"What's wrong with Ann? I remember now that I didn't see her in that drove just now, and she certainly ain't at home, because I'm just from thar."
"No, she isn't at home," Dolly frowned, and, for an obvious reason, raised her voice to a high pitch, "but I'll tell you where she is, and as her own blood uncle you can share my humiliation." Therewith Dolly grimly pointed at a closet door close by. "Open it," she said. "The truth is, I told her she would have to stay there twenty minutes, and I've been bothered all through the last recitation for fear she wouldn't get enough air. All at once she got still, though she kept up a terrible racket at first."
With a grin Webb mounted the platform and opened the door of the closet. He opened it quite widely, that Dolly might look into the receptacle from where she stood. And there against the wall, seated on the floor, was Dolly's sister Ann, a slim-legged, rather pretty girl about fourteen years of age, her eyes sullenly cast down. Around her were some dismantled, ill-smelling lamps, a step-ladder, an old stove, and a bench holding a stack of hymn-books.
"She ain't quite dead," John said, dryly. "She's still breathin' below the neck, an' she's got some red in the face."
"She ought to be red from head to foot," Dolly said, for the culprit's ears. "Ann, come here!"
There was no movement on the part of the prisoner save a desultory picking of the fingers at a fold of her gingham skirt.