“Why doesn’t she wear a wig? Though after all that auburn is rather nice. I don’t see why she doesn’t change ’em around sometimes—”
“Well, Jane, perhaps you can tell us,” Miss Farrel’s soft voice broke in upon these reflections, and Jane started as if she had been awakened from a sound sleep. She gasped, and then quickly recovering herself, said blandly,
There was a dead silence. Jane looked about her in surprise, to find every eye in the room fixed on her.
Jane swallowed. She had not the remotest idea what the question was. Nevertheless she made a bold attempt to conceal this fact, and with an aplomb admirable under the circumstances, said,
“I didn’t exactly understand the question, Miss Farrel.”
A faint tinge of color appeared upon each of Miss Farrel’s cheekbones, and her almost invisible eyebrows went up.
“And what didn’t you understand about it? I am sure I don’t see how it could be expressed in any clearer terms. Will you repeat it to me? Then we can soon find out just where my words confused you.” The old lady felt that she was being exceedingly cunning.
Jane winked her eyes rapidly, opened her mouth, shut it, and moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. She knew she was cornered.
“Yes, Jane. And stand up please when you recite,” said Miss Farrel in ominously gentle tones. “And don’t fidget, Jane. Put that eraser down. We are waiting, Jane.”
“Well, what I didn’t understand was—was—I didn’t understand—I didn’t understand the question.”
“Oh. And what, pray, have you been doing?”
“Ah. How interesting. And what were you thinking of?”
Jane tried to keep her face straight, and looked down to hide the laughter in her eyes.
Silence again. Miss Farrel opened her little black record book, and slowly and deliberately registered Jane’s crime.
“Sit down, Jane. And will you please wait for me here after school. At three o’clock. Well, Isabel, will _you_ give me the formula for finding the area of a circle.”
“What a goose I am, anyway,” she thought, and accepted her punishment with her usual calmness.
At three o’clock, when the other girls, chattering and laughing gathered their books and left the school-room singly and in groups, she sat at her desk waiting for Miss Farrel. The cleaning woman came in, with her mop and bucket, and began to splash the dusty wooden floor. She was a talkative, good-natured old thing, and one of Jane’s numerous intimates.