Dahlin
had occupied that very morning. What did it mean ...?

At that moment the Rector entered, long overdue to give them an hour in
Latin--an hour of which a goodly part already was gone. The boys dropped
into their seats. A murmur of expectation passed through the class.
Every eye was on the Rector's face which seemed to twitch in a
peculiar fashion.

"The school has suffered a terrible loss," he said at last, his voice
sounding very hoarse. "There is only one thing we can do--work! Will
_primus_ please begin translating from the top of the twenty-second
page, where we left off yesterday."

The boys stared at him, but no one dared to speak. They knew there was
no escape, and they tried to fix their attention on the books. Keith saw
before him a blurred page full of dancing letters. _Primus_ stumbled and
blundered. He was followed by _secundus_ and _tertius_. Keith had
recovered a little by that time, and he knew they were making mistakes
that ordinarily would have called forth a storm of reproof from the
Rector. Now he paid no attention, but merely repeated:

"Go on--go on!"

At last the lesson came to an end, and then they were dismissed for the
day.

On his way home Keith's thoughts ran in a futile circle around the day's
event. If they had never left the rink ... if they had been saved ... if
the story about Dahlin could have been true....

Always his thoughts returned to the same point: the strangeness of the
fact that those boys would never appear again. At no moment, however,
did it occur to him that the same thing might have happened to
himself--or might happen some time in the future. He was Keith
Wellander, to whom such things never happened.

He was nearly home when he suddenly stopped in the middle of East Long
Street and said to himself:

"Now I suppose I'll _never_ get leave to go skating again."

XXI

Among other new duties that accompanied Keith's entrance into the fourth
grade was church-going. Until then he had known little about public
worship beyond what he observed during two or three attendances of Yule
Matins, that was almost like going to a party. The rule of the school
was that all pupils in the higher grades who not going to church with
their parents elsewhere must attend services with their respective
classes every other Sunday at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

Judging by the number of boys who turned up, the percentage of
church-goers among the parents must have been