When the children came trooping back, they found the door between cloak-room and schoolroom closed, and teacher waiting for them in the outer room with very rosy cheeks and a happier expression than her face usually wore.
Tommy Todd looked relieved, for, he reasoned, if teacher knew there were two rats in his desk, she would not have looked pleased. In a few words Miss Wilde explained the happenings, cautioned them to be very good, and saying, “Right, left, right, left,” was about to open the door for the children to march in, when Sarah Barnes asked, “Teacher, what is her name, so we can call her by it?” Then teacher realized that she didn’t know. But as the door opened Sarah said, in a very loud whisper, as whispers are apt to sound louder than the natural voice, “Why, it’s my Gray Lady!” and so in truth it was.
Teacher watched them until they took their seats, and then gently closed the door behind her. For a moment no one spoke. Tommy Todd peeped cautiously into his desk to be sure the rats were safe, and found to his dismay that they were gone. Inwardly he hoped they wouldn’t get loose, for Gray Lady didn’t look as if she would like rats, which showed that after only one glance he wished to please her, while at the same time the name by which they first knew her became fixed in the mind of every child.
The silence inside the school continued a full minute, that seemed like an hour, and the dripping of the rain from the gutter was so plain that Sarah found herself counting the drops—“One—two—three—four—splash!”
Fifteen pairs of eyes were fastened upon the newcomer, and, as she caught the various questions in them, the colour in her cheeks deepened. Suddenly she recognized her little friend whom she had met on the hillside the week before. “Sarah Barnes,” said Gray Lady, “will you not tell me the names of your schoolmates and introduce me to them? It is always so much more pleasant when we are looking at people, places, or things to know what they are called.”
Then Sarah, delighted at being remembered when she had begun to be quite sure that all her hopes were in vain, guided by an inborn instinct of politeness that told her it would not be civil to stand at her desk and call out the various names, marched solemnly up to the teacher’s desk and, beginning in the front row with her own little sister Mary, repeated the fifteen names in full, with the greatest care and distinctness, and each child, not knowing what else to do, bobbed up and answered, “Present,” the same as if teacher had been calling the roll. When Sarah had finished, she was quite out of breath, for some of the names were very long; the last, that of the one little Slav in the school, Zella Francesca Mowralski, being also hard to pronounce.