With a conscious smirk, amid the titters of the room and the sharp raps
of the ruler on Miss Berham's desk, Solon swaggered offensively to the
seat that enshrined my idol, and flung down the scarlet treasure before
her. She merely pushed the thing away, bending her head lower above her
book--pushed it away with a blind little hand, and with undiminished
bravado her despoiler returned, scathless of heaven's vengeance, to his
seat.

"And you may remain half an hour after school. The A-class, ready for
geography!"

Thus, lightly did our ruler turn from tragedy to comedy. For tragedy,
there was the look my queen lavished upon Solon when she heard his
sentence; a look of blushing merriment, with a maddening dash of pity in
it,--he was to suffer because of her.

"'Twas your beauty that made me do it," he might have quoted, with the
old result. How I longed for the jaunty lightness that would have let me
do a thing like that, tossing me fairly to the pinnacle of a public
association with her! But I, instead, moped alone, knowing well that the
gifts of graceful brigandage were not mine. Had _I_ snatched that
ribbon, there would have been tears and a mad outcry at my brutal
roughness.

Now came the lesson in geography. I had known it, had studied it
faithfully that morning. It treated of the state from which she had so
lately come. But, now, all knowledge of it fled me, save that on the map
it was a large, clumsy state, though yellow, the color of her hair. Was
it to be bounded like any cheaper state? Did it have principal products,
like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and other ordinary states? Its color