She could feel the wave of smothered laughter in the air around her.A rush of anger turned her face scarlet and her soul sick.The voice of the professor addressed her directly.
"This proposition seems to be beautifully demonstrated,Miss Cornstalk,"he said."Surely,you can tell us how you did it."That word of praise saved her.She could do good work.
They might wear their pretty clothes,have their friends and make life a greater misery than it ever before had been for her,but not one of them should do better work or be more womanly.That lay with her.She was tall,straight,and handsome as she arose.
"Of course I can explain my work,"she said in natural tones.
"What I can't explain is how I happened to be so stupid as to make a mistake in writing my own name.I must have been a little nervous.Please excuse me."She went to the board,swept off the signature with one stroke,then rewrote it plainly."My name is Comstock,"she said distinctly.She returned to her seat and following the formula used by the others made her first high school recitation.
As Elnora resumed her seat Professor Henley looked at her steadily."It puzzles me,"he said deliberately,how you can write as beautiful a demonstration,and explain it as clearly as ever has been done in any of my classes and still be so disturbed as to make a mistake in your own name.
Are you very sure you did that yourself,Miss Comstock?""It is impossible that any one else should have done it,"answered Elnora.
"I am very glad you think so,"said the professor.
"Being Freshmen,all of you are strangers to me.
I should dislike to begin the year with you feeling there was one among you small enough to do a trick like that.
The next proposition,please."
When the hour had gone the class filed back to the study room and Elnora followed in desperation,because she did not know where else to go.She could not study as she had no books,and when the class again left the room to go to another professor for the next recitation,she went also.
At least they could put her out if she did not belong there.
Noon came at last,and she kept with the others until they dispersed on the sidewalk.She was so abnormally self-conscious she fancied all the hundreds of that laughing,throng saw and jested at her.When she passed the brown-eyed boy walking with the girl of her encounter,she knew,for she heard him say:"Did you really let that gawky piece of calico get ahead of you?"The answer was indistinct.
Elnora hurried from the city.She intended to get her lunch,eat it in the shade of the first tree,and then decide whether she would go back or go home.She knelt on the bridge and reached for her box,but it was so very light that she was prepared for the fact that it was empty,before opening it.There was one thing for which to be thankful.
The boy or tramp who had seen her hide it,had left the napkin.
She would not have to face her mother and account for its loss.She put it in her pocket,and threw the box into the ditch.Then she sat on the bridge and tried to think,but her brain was confused.
"Perhaps the worst is over,"she said at last."I will go back.What would mother say to me if I came home now?"So she returned to the high school,followed some other pupils to the coat room,hung her hat,and found her way to the study where she had been in the morning.Twice that afternoon,with aching head and empty stomach,she faced strange professors,in different branches.Once she escaped notice;the second time the worst happened.She was asked a question she could not answer.
"Have you not decided on your course,and secured your books?"inquired the professor.
"I have decided on my course,"replied Elnora,"Ido not know where to ask for my books."
"Ask?"the professor was bewildered.
"I understood the books were furnished,"faltered Elnora.
"Only to those bringing an order from the township trustee,"replied the Professor.
"No!Oh no!"cried Elnora."I will have them to-morrow,"and gripped her desk for support for she knew that was not true.Four books,ranging perhaps at a dollar and a half apiece;would her mother buy them?
Of course she would not--could not.
Did not Elnora know the story of old.There was enough land,but no one to do clearing and farm.Tax on all those acres,recently the new gravel road tax added,the expense of living and only the work of two women to meet all of it.She was insane to think she could come to the city to school.Her mother had been right.The girl decided that if only she lived to reach home,she would stay there and lead any sort of life to avoid more of this torture.Bad as what she wished to escape had been,it was nothing like this.She never could live down the movement that went through the class when she inadvertently revealed the fact that she had expected books to be furnished.Her mother would not secure them;that settled the question.
But the end of misery is never in a hurry to come;before the day was over the superintendent entered the room and explained that pupils from the country were charged a tuition of twenty dollars a year.That really was the end.
Previously Elnora had canvassed a dozen methods for securing the money for books,ranging all the way from offering to wash the superintendent's dishes to breaking into the bank.This additional expense made her plans so wildly impossible,there was nothing to do but hold up her head until she was from sight.
Down the long corridor alone among hundreds,down the long street alone among thousands,out into the country she came at last.Across the fence and field,along the old trail once trodden by a boy's bitter agony,now stumbled a white-faced girl,sick at heart.She sat on a log and began to sob in spite of her efforts at self-control.At first it wasphysical breakdown,later,thought came crowding.
