Kitty came down the class-room aisle as jubilant and beaming, as if, outside, March winds and March rains were not having it all their own way.

“I’ve my subject for the Sargent!” she announced to the little group gathered about one of the windows at the far end of the room.

“What is it?” Debby asked.

“That’s telling,” Kitty settled herself on the window-seat beside Blue Bonnet.

“I wish I had mine,” Amanda sighed. “Have you yours, Blue Bonnet?”

“I’m not going to write any.” Blue Bonnet felt a swift relief in this sudden settling of the question, once for all. She didn’t want to even hear about the Sargent just then. She wanted to get out in the rain, to battle with the wind and storm, instead of watching it here from the window. But there wouldn’t be any good in getting out for the little while recess lasted. It must have been someone like the founder of the Sargent prize who had settled on half-hour recesses.

“Not going to try!” Susy exclaimed, wonderingly. “But we’re all going to, Blue Bonnet!”

313 “Probably.”

“It’s the—the proper thing to do, you know,” Ruth added.

“Ruth’s poaching on your ground, Sarah!” Kitty remarked.

Blue Bonnet twisted the end of her long braid impatiently. “That’s one reason why I am not going to try! There are so many ‘proper things’ to be done here in Woodford.”

“Don’t you worry, my dear,” Kitty observed; “no one’s likely to mistake you for a true, bred-in-the-bone Woodfordite—yet awhile.”

“You’ll be the only one of the ‘We are Seven’s’ not trying, Blue Bonnet,” Ruth protested.

“That’ll be something. Anyhow, only one girl can get it, out of the whole class.”

“That’s what makes it so jolly if one does win!” Kitty explained.

“I think it would be horrid, winning it away from everyone else!” Blue Bonnet declared. “And if one didn’t win—that would be horrid too.”

“But,” Sarah said slowly, “even if one doesn’t win the prize, won’t it be better, for one’s self, I mean, to know one has tried?”
“It is better to have tried and lost,
Than never tried at all.”

Kitty chanted.

Sarah looked grave; “I don’t think you should parody those lines, Kitty!”

314 Kitty wrinkled up her pert little nose. “Don’t you, Sallykins? Then I won’t—until the next time they come in handy.”

“Kitty, be good!” Ruth urged.

“‘And let who will, be clever,’” Debby added. “Has anyone heard how Mademoiselle is? Will she be able to come to-day?”

“She’s worse!” Ruth said, “I asked this morning.”

All but Sarah and Amanda—who were not taking French—groaned. It was Wednesday,—French day,—and it would make the third time running that Mademoiselle had had to be absent. It would also mean Monsieur Hugo again.

“It’s very provoking, how the wrong persons will go and get sick,” Debby sighed. “No one would have minded Monsieur Hugo getting the grip!”

“As if he could ever really substitute for Mademoiselle Lamotte,” Susy protested—the class adored Mademoiselle. “We haven’t had a decent recitation with him yet.”

“It’s all his fault!” Debby insisted; “he’s so cross and so—polite. I mean it,” she added, as the rest laughed, “I don’t know whether to call it crossly polite, or politely cross. One could stand either of them alone—but together!”

“My prophetic soul warns me that there are breakers ahead!” Kitty said.

315 And that afternoon, catching sight of Monsieur through the half-open door, she leaned forward to whisper to Blue Bonnet, who sat just in front, “I’ve discovered what he’s like—he looks as though he had been brought up on his own irregular verbs and they hadn’t agreed with him.”

“Wouldn’t you have wanted them to?” Blue Bonnet laughed back.

“Katherine! Elizabeth!” Miss Fellows said, adding that the French class were to go to their recitation-room at once.

“She should have said—the class in French,” Debby commented, slipping into place behind Blue Bonnet and Kitty, “Poor Monsieur, I’m rather sorry for him.”

“I’m letting pity begin at home!” Kitty returned, as the three retired modestly to the back row, leaving the front seats for Hester Manly and what Kitty called, “the other stars.”

“The class will come to order!” Monsieur was looking straight at the back row; he had very keen eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.

That was a truly awful half-hour for more than one member of the class.

Monsieur did not in the least understand “the youth American,” and had even less sympathy with what he considered his present pupils’ inexcusable lack of preparation.

Extremely polite in voice and manner, but possessing316 to a marked degree the gift of sarcasm, his methods were so dissimilar from those of their beloved Mademoiselle—who had the knack of extracting answers from the most unpromising pupil—that the majority of the class soon gave up trying to make even a creditable showing; deciding, apparently, that endurance—and dumb endurance at that—was the only course left them.

His polite request that they should not all endeavor to reply at once, they obeyed to the letter.

“He’s only a ‘sub,’ anyhow,” Kitty reminded Blue Bonnet.

Blue Bonnet’s face was crimson; he was too hateful—she shouldn’t try to answer another single question.

Monsieur was on his feet by now, walking back and forth before the class, gesticulating nervously, shrugging impatiently; was it possible that he had made the mistake—that they were not the class in French after all? Or was it that they took not the interest in his language? He was there to instruct, to hear the recitations, to correct the pronunciation, mais—

All of which, poured out in rapid French, did not help matters any.

“We go now to make the attempt further,” he opened the book again. “Mademoiselle,” he fixed his glance on Hester, “will kindly translate.”

Hester did her best, which was not so bad after317 what had gone before, and for a few moments peace descended on the room. But Hester giving place presently to her next neighbor, a boy who was only taking French because another fellow had said it was a whole lot easier than German, trouble began once more.

“That will do!” Monsieur closed his book. “It is incomprehensible—the badness of it!” He looked from one to another of the faces before him, some flushed, some indifferent, some sullen, and some genuinely distressed. “We will call it the failure—all complete. You comprehend that? The failure for each! For the next time, we take the same lesson. Moi, I do not permit myself the hope that it will go better, I have not the room for hope left—only the amazement, indescribable. The class is dismissed.”

Three minutes after general dismission that afternoon, an indignation meeting was held in that same little recitation-room.

“He’s an old—” Kitty’s gesture, borrowed from Monsieur, filled out her sentence.

“At least, he didn’t show any partiality—when it came to compliments,” one of the boys laughed.

“Some of us did fail,” Ruth began.

“We did,” the other cut in.

“But not all—Hester and some of the rest did all right; it wasn’t fair, giving them failures too.”

“Maybe,” another boy suggested, “he was trying318 to strike the general average. I say—wouldn’t Mademoiselle have been proud of us!”

“I’ll never, never recite to him again!” Debby declared.

“Has any one accused you of reciting this afternoon?” her brother Billy asked.

“Nor will I!” Kitty exclaimed.

“Listen—everybody!” Billy jumped up on to one of the benches. “Let’s take a vote on it—here and now! Supposing—which the fates forbid!—Monsieur Hugo should again—present himself in the capacity of substitute for Mademoiselle, will the class cut class in a body?—or will it not?”

“It will!” one of his mates answered promptly.

For a few moments confusion reigned supreme; then one of the older boys, deposing Billy, not too gently, succeeded in getting the attention of the rest. “It is hereby resolved, and so forth,” he said. “Those in favor—kindly signify in the usual manner! The ayes have it! Majority rules.”

“Oh, dear,” one of the girls said anxiously, “I hope he doesn’t come again.”

“I don’t,” Kitty insisted, “I’d just like to show him—”

“But,” Blue Bonnet said, as the club members went downstairs together—all except Sarah and Amanda, “wouldn’t it be a great deal simpler to go tell Mr. Hunt that you didn’t want that Monsieur Hugo again?”

319 Kitty stopped to stare at her. “Bless the child’s ignorance! I’d like to see any of us doing it!”

“I wouldn’t mind—truly,” Blue Bonnet answered.

Kitty turned on her almost fiercely; “You’d better not, Blue Bonnet Ashe! This is a class affair—don’t you forget that!”

“Well,” Ruth said thoughtfully, “it is to be hoped Mademoiselle is able to come Friday; we’ll be in pretty hot water if she isn’t.”

Blue Bonnet was looking perplexed; school life seemed full of unexpected pitfalls. “I suppose,” she questioned, “that cutting class is considered pretty bad?”

“We sha’n’t exactly expect rewards of merit for doing it,” Debby answered.

“Which way did you vote, Blue Bonnet?” Kitty asked, sharply.

“I didn’t vote; before I really understood what it was you were all going to do, Billy told me it was quite settled.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kitty said; “of course, you’ll go with the class; unless—”

“Unless?” Blue Bonnet repeated.

Kitty laughed. “Unless you want to be jolly uncomfortable afterwards.”

“We’re all of us likely to be that,” Ruth said hurriedly, as Blue Bonnet’s color rose. “Oh, I’m not backing out—so you needn’t look at me in320 that tone of voice, Kitty! But I’ve got sense enough not to look forward with any pleasure to a tussle with the powers that be.”

“The powers that be shouldn’t have sent such a horrid substitute!” Debby insisted.

Contrary to her usual habit, Blue Bonnet did not go into the sitting-room on reaching home, but straight on up to her own room. Curling herself up in the window-seat overlooking the bare, rain-swept garden, she tried to think things over; knowing all the while that for her there was no choice.

“I am going to put you on your honor not to disobey in this fashion again; and so try to conform more carefully to all the rules of the school.” The words had been running through her mind all the way home.

She had promised.

The girls would think that she was—Blue Bonnet moved restlessly; they must think what they would. Oh, why had Mademoiselle gone and got the grip! If it had not been for what Kitty had said about it’s being a class affair, she could have gone to Mr. Hunt and asked him to release her from her promise. He would have understood. He had understood perfectly that morning; and been so kind.

“Solomon,” she said wearily, as he came rubbing against her, asking reproachfully why she had left321 it for him to find out that she had got home, “Solomon, old chap, we’re up against it!”

Solomon jumped up beside her, sticking his cold nose under her soft chin.

“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, at school, Solomon,” she told him. “Be mighty thankful you don’t have to go to school, sir.”

It was a very sober Blue Bonnet who came down at last to the sitting-room, where Grandmother and Aunt Lucinda waited anxiously, Aunt Lucinda being of Blue Bonnet’s own mind—that if it were not one thing, it was apt to be another.

“Did you get wet, dear?” Grandmother asked.

“Not to amount to anything.” Blue Bonnet dropped down on the lounge, looking as if life were all at once too much for her.

“Has anything gone wrong at school, my dear?” her aunt asked.

“I should rather think there had! But I can’t tell you about it, Aunt Lucinda; because it’s what Kitty calls—‘a class affair.’”

Grandmother and Aunt Lucinda looked relieved; there was safety in numbers; but Blue Bonnet, lying back among the cushions, watched the little flames opposite dance and flicker, with troubled eyes.

They had all taken it for granted that she would act with them, and when she did not—

It would spoil everything, the club good times—everything.322 Blue Bonnet sprang up and went to her practising; Mademoiselle must come on Friday! Surely she would be well enough by then.

It was just before supper that Alec ran over to return a book; he found Blue Bonnet alone in the back parlor.

“............