I really do." Then she said what he had known all the time was coming: "I'm afraid you won't see your mother to-day, dear.

She's not well.
She's in bed." "Why?
Is she ill ?" "She's tired after her journey yesterday, I expect." He said no more.
He tried during the whole of that day not to think of his mother, and he found that, for the first time in his life, he could do nothing else but think of her.

During the morning he sat very silently over his lessons, did all that he was told, did not once kick Mary under the table, nor ask Miss Jones to sharpen his pencil, nor make faces at Hamlet.

Once or twice, in a way that he had, he leaned his head on his hand as though he were an ancient professor with a whole library of great works behind him, and when Miss Jones asked him whether he had a headache he said: "No, thank you," instead of seizing on the wonderful opportunity of release that such a question offered him.

When they all went for a walk in the afternoon, he sprang for a moment into something of his natural vivacity.