s.

"'Dear friend,"' he declaimed. "'You call me beautiful, but I am not
really beautiful, and there are times when I doubt if I am even pretty,
though perhaps my hair is beautiful, and if it is true that my eyes are
like blue stars in heaven--'"

Simultaneously he lost his breath and there burst upon him a perception
of the results to which he was being committed by this calamitous
reading. And also simultaneous the outbreak of the class into
cachinnations of delight, severely repressed by the perplexed but
indignant Miss Spence.

"Go on!" she commanded grimly, when she had restored order.

"Ma'am?" he gulped, looking wretchedly upon the rosy faces all about
him.

"Go on with the description of yourself," she said. "We'd like to hear
some more about your eyes being like blue stars in heaven."

Here many of Penrod's little comrades were forced to clasp their faces
tightly in both hands; and his dismayed gaze, in refuge, sought the
treacherous paper in his hand.

What it beheld there was horrible.

"Proceed!" Miss Spence said.

"'I--often think,'" he faltered, "'and a-a tree-more th-thrills my bein'
when I REcall your last words to me--that last--that last--that--'"

"GO ON!"

"'That last evening in the moonlight when you--you--you--'"

"Penrod," Miss Spence said dangerously, "you go on, and stop that
stammering."

"'You--you said you would wait for--for years to--to--to--to--"

"PENROD!"

"'To win me!'" the miserable Penrod managed to gasp. "'I should not
have pre--premitted--permitted you to speak so until we have our--our
parents' con-consent; but oh, how sweet it--'" He exhaled a sigh
of agony, and then concluded briskly, "'Yours respectfully, Penrod
Schofield.'"

But Miss Spence had at last divined something, for she knew the
Schofield family.

"Bring me that letter!" she said.

And the scarlet boy passed forward between rows of mystified but
immoderately uplifted children.

Miss Spence herself grew rather pink as she examined the missive, and
the intensity with which she afterward extended her examination to
cover the complete field of Penrod Schofield caused him to find a remote
centre of interest whereon to rest his embarrassed gaze. She let him
stand before her throughout a silence, equalled, perhaps, by the tenser
pauses during trials for murder, and then, containing herself, she
sweepingly gestured him to the pillory--a chair upon the platform,
facing the school.

Here he suffered