The air in the schoolroom was close and warm, and dust lay thick upon the floor and danced in the beams of sunlight that filtered through the grimy window-panes.
Susan walked about, surveying the battered desks covered with scratches and ink-spots and ornamented with initials cut into the wood. The door of the rusty stove stood open, and within lay a heap of torn papers. The faded maps were not interesting, and Susan began to think the schoolroom more attractive when peeped at from the porch than when actually within it.
“Let’s go outside,” said she to Gentilla, who had followed her about like Mary’s lamb. “Then we’ll sit down and eat our lunch.” The lunch basket, guarded by Flip and Snowball, had been left on the porch steps.
Susan turned the knob of the schoolhouse door, which had swung shut behind them, and pulled. The door wouldn’t open. Susan tugged until she grew red in the face.
Gentilla obligingly gave a pull, and toppled over backward upon the floor.
“Don’t cry,” said Susan, helping her to her feet. “We will just climb out of the window.”
But the windows, swollen and stiff, were no more accommodating than the door.
Susan climbed up on the window-sill, and, covered with dust and dirt, pushed and pulled until she was quite out of breath.
“I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t open it. What shall we do?”
Gentilla’s face puckered up at sight of Susan’s distress. She ran back to the door and beat upon it with her soft little fists.
“You open, you open,” called Gentilla, in a pitiful little pipe that would have moved a heart of stone.
Susan wanted to cry. There was a big lump in her throat, and it was only vigorous winking and blinking that kept the tears from falling down her cheeks.
But Susan was repeating to herself something she had overheard Grandmother say to Miss Liza that very afternoon.
“Susan is a real little mother to Gentilla,” Grandmother had said.
And, at the time, Susan had thought, “If Gentilla ever falls into the fire or tumbles down the well, I must be the one to pull her out.”
And she had almost hoped that something of the kind might happen, so that she might show how brave she was, and how devoted to her little friend.
Surely now the time had come. Perhaps they would have to stay forever in the schoolhouse. Without anything to eat they would grow thinner and thinner and thinner until there would be nothing left of them at all. At this doleful thought, one tear rolled down Susan’s nose and splashed on the dusty boards. But only one! For she swallowed hard, gave herself a little shake, and then took Gentilla by the hand.