“MR. MEADOWCROFT, will you please excuse Rose and me at ten minutes
before two?” the girl asked in a low, strained voice. Her desperation
made of the request a veritable demand.
Meadowcroft looked at her in amazement. Was the girl out of her head?
“Betty Pogany, what do you mean? What has come over you, pray?” he
asked.
She raised her eyes with an effort. To him they flashed defiance,
though in reality their expression meant desperate entreaty; as she
repeated the request her voice showed the effort it cost her to speak
at all.
“For what? Is either of you ill?” he asked.
She shook her head impatiently,--an action that did not help her.
“Have you a written request from someone in authority?” he asked less
kindly.
Of course he knew that she hadn’t! She couldn’t speak. She only stared
at him with that odd, alien expression in her soft, dark eyes.
“See here, Betty, just tell me why you want to go,” he proposed kindly.
“Tell me just enough so that I can decide whether it would seem to
another extremely important. If so, if it seem merely important instead
of extremely so, I will excuse you, even though it would mean losing
the extra recitation after school. You ought to know, my child, that
young folk often get distorted views of things. You are hardly old
enough to assume the self-assured manner you have exhibited of late.
Perhaps a mistaken sense of values misleads you. Come, now, let us
forget for the moment everything that has happened since Mr. Appleton
went away, and you tell me why you make what seems to me like a strange
demand?”
He smiled kindly, but his very kindness seemed malicious.
“I can’t,” she said sharply, and the bell rang for the close of
intermission.
“Very well, then, that’s all there is to it,” he said dryly.
Betty looked wildly towards Rose with an impulse to seize her arm
and run with her from the building. But in a quieter moment, she had
already seen the folly of such procedure, and she returned to her
seat. The minutes dragged, each being a stretch of agony, and yet all
too soon came the hour at which for nine weeks she and Rose had left
to take the train for Millville. It seemed as if she could not sit
still, as if she must snatch Rose away and run to the station. She
looked wildly at Mr. Meadowcroft in the mad hope that he would bid her
go if she liked. But the class filed into the recitation room leaving
the three culprits flanked by rows of empty seats. There was no class
reciting in the room at that hour and the silence was intense. Ten
minutes passed and Betty heard the train whistle. That was really the
end of everything. It seemed to the girl that her heart was broken.
After a little she glanced fearfully at Rose. Rose looked unusually
sober and Betty averted her eyes quickly, lest she break down utterly.
Rose was beginning to comprehend. She had trusted to Betty to find some
way out of the difficulty and had kept up her spirits wonderfully. But
she, too, had heard the whistle and knew it meant her doom. It was like
a tolling bell.
She looked wildly at Mr. Meadowcroft, who was jotting down figures in
the big record book. And suddenly the girl knew that she hated him.
Betty Pogany, who had never in all her life hated anyone, who was
gentle and charitable and affectionate even towards her Aunt Sarah,
who was acknowledged by everyone to be uncommonly disagreeable,--Betty
Pogany felt that she hated this man as she would have hated those
terrible people in the French Revolution who sent Marie Antoinette upon
that awful way to the guillotine.