Miss Prudence | Page 3

her large slate. She was not sitting in her own seat, her seat was the back seat on the girls' side, of course, but she was sitting midway on the boys' side, and her slate was placed on the side of the double desk wherein H.R. was cut in deep, ugly letters. She had fled to this seat as to a refuge, when she found herself alone, with something of the same feeling, that once two or three years ago when she was away from home and homesick she used to kneel to say her prayers in the corner of the chamber where her valise was; there was home about the valise and there was protection and safety and a sort of helpfulness about this desk where her friend Hollis Rheid had sat ever since she had come to school. This was her first winter at school, her mother had taught her at home, but in family council this winter it had been decided that Marjorie was "big" enough to go to school.
The half mile home seemed a long way to walk alone, and the huge Newfoundland at the farmhouse down the hill was not always chained; he had sprung out at them this morning and the girls had huddled together while Hollis and Frank Grey had driven him inside his own yard. Hollis had thrown her an intelligent glance as he filed out with the boys, and had telegraphed something back to her as he paused for one instant at the door. Not quite understanding the telegraphic signal, she was waiting for him, or for something. His lips had looked like: "Wait till I come." If the people at home were not anxious about her she would have been willing to wait until midnight; it would never occur to her that Hollis might forget her.
Her cheeks flushed as she waited, and her eyes filled with tears; it was a soft, warm, round face, with coaxing, kissable lips, a smooth, low brow and the gentlest of hazel eyes: not a pretty face, excepting in its lovely childishness and its hints of womanly graces; some of the girls said she was homely. Marjorie thought herself that she was very homely; but she had comforted herself with, "God made my face, and he likes it this way." Some one says that God made the other features, but permits us to make the mouth. Marjorie's sweetness certainly made her mouth. But then she was born sweet. Josie Grey declared that she would rather see a girl "get mad" than cry, as Marjorie did when the boys washed her face in the snow.
Mr. Holmes had written to a friend that Marjorie West, his favorite among the girls, was "almost too sweet." He said to himself that he feared she "lacked character." Marjorie's quiet, observant father would have smiled at that and said nothing. The teacher said that she did not know how to take her own part. Marjorie had been eleven years in this grasping world and had not learned that she had any "part" to take.
Since her pencil had ceased scribbling the room was so still that a tiny mouse had been nibbling at the toe of her shoe. Just then as she raised her head and pinned her shawl more securely the door opened and something happened. The something happened in Marjorie's face. Hollis Rheid thought the sunset had burst across it. She did not exclaim, "Oh, I am so glad!" but the gladness was all in her eyes. If Marjorie had been more given to exclamations her eyes would not have been so expressive. The closed lips were a gain to the eyes and her friends missed nothing. The boy had learned her eyes by heart. How stoutly he would have resisted if some one had told him that years hence Marjorie's face would be a sealed volume to him.
But she was making her eyes and mouth to-day and years hence she made them, too. Perhaps he had something to do with it then as he certainly had something to do with it now.
"I came back with my sled to take you home. I gave Sam my last ten cents to do the night work for me. It was my turn, but he was willing enough. Where's your hood, Mousie? Any books to take?"
"Yes, my Geography and Arithmetic," she answered, taking her fleecy white hood from the seat behind her.
"Now you look like a sunbeam in a cloud," he said poetically as she tied it over her brown head. "Oh, ho!" turning to the blackboard, "you do make handsome figures. Got them all right, did you?"
"I knew how to do them, it was only that--I forgot."
"I don't think you'll forget again in a hurry. And that's a nice looking slate, too,"