This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I
myself had deliberately produced it.
Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was
so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But
my business was with the child.
"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they
both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal
when you're not watching him--you catch him at it--but he never comes
near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid
boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent
his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or
anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the
moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North
America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys
are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a
corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down
all the other boys in cold blood."
"He has nice hair," said my woman child.
"Oh, he _has!_ Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or
anything like that--the name the boys call him by, you know?"
"Fatty--Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean.
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