It quite shook him for the time,
and he felt humiliated. He had not the courage
to tell his father; so he lingered on from
day to day, sat vacantly gazing out of his window,
and tried vainly to interest himself in the
busy bustle down on the street. It provoked
him that everybody else should be so light-
hearted, when he was, or at least fancied himself,
in trouble. The parlor grew intolerable;
he sought refuge in his bedroom. There
he sat one evening (it was the third day after
the examination), and stared out upon the gray
stone walls which on all sides enclosed the
narrow court-yard. The round stupid face of the
moon stood tranquilly dozing like a great Limburger
cheese suspended under the sky.
Ralph, at least, could think of a no more
fitting simile. But the bright-eyed young girl
in the window hard by sent a longing look up
to the same moon, and thought of her distant
home on the fjords, where the glaciers stood
like hoary giants, and caught the yellow moonbeams
on their glittering shields of snow. She
had been reading "Ivanhoe" all the afternoon,
until the twilight had overtaken her quite
unaware, and now she suddenly remembered that
she had forgotten to write her German exercise.
She lifted her face and saw a pair of sad, vacant
eyes, gazing at her from the next window in
the angle of the court. She was a little startled
at first, but in the next moment she thought of
her German exercise and took heart.
"Do you know German?" she said; then
immediately repented that she had said it.
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