All that night Betty lay wakeful and thinking--thinking as she had
many, many a time during the last three years, trying to make plans
whereby she might adjust her thoughts to a life of loneliness, as
she had decided in her romantic heart was all she would take. How
could there be anything else for her since that terrible night
when Richard had come to her and confessed his guilt--his love and
his renunciation! Was she not sharing it all with him wherever he
might be, and whatever he was doing? Oh, where was he? Did he ever
think of her and know she was always thinking of him? Did he know
she prayed for him, and was the thought a comfort to him? Surely
Peter was the happier of the two, for he was not a sorrowing
criminal, wandering the earth, hiding and repenting. So all her
thoughts went out to Richard, and no wonder she was a weary little
wight at the end of the school day.

Four o'clock, and the children went hurrying away, all but Hilton Le
Moyne, who lingered awhile at his desk, and then reluctantly departed,
seeing Teacher did not look up from her papers except to give him a
nod and a fugitive little smile of absent-minded courtesy. Left thus
alone, Betty lifted the lid of her desk and put away the school
register and the carefully marked papers to be given out the next day,
and took from a small portfolio a packet of closely written sheets.
These she untied and looked over, tossing them rapidly aside one after
another until she found the one for which she searched.

It was a short poem, hastily written with lead pencil, and much
crumpled and worn, as if it had been carried about. Now she
straightened the torn edges and smoothed it out and began scanning the
lines, counting off on her fingers the rhythmic beats; she copied the
verses carefully on a fresh white sheet of paper and laid them aside;
then, shoving the whole heap of written papers from her, she selected
another fresh sheet and began anew, writing and scanning and writing
again.

Steadily she worked while an hour slipped by. A great bumblebee flew
in at one window and boomed past her head and out at the other window,
and a bluebird perched for an instant on the window ledge and was off
again. She saw the bee and the bird and paused awhile, gazing with
dreamy eyes through the high, uncurtained window at drifting clouds
already taking on the tint of the declining sun; then she stretched
her arms across her wide desk, and putting her head down on them,