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"Yes," I said. "I thought he must have. Thank you for telling me."
Mr. Aiken gave me a baffled look. "You thought — ? But why should a kid do a thing like that?"
"His mother's trying to make a pianist out of him," I explained wearily. "He hates it."
"He must hate it an awful lot!"
"He does," I said. "He does, Mr. Aiken."
He went out, shaking his head, and I mechanically did my few routine schoolroom chores. So, after all, I must see Charles. He had to know, and he would have to decide. Before leaving, I looked at myself in my pocket mirror, applied rouge and lipstick — but not from vanity. From some inner feeling that I should give his eyes something pleasant to see, to balance the hard things his ears would have to hear.
I HAD never been in his small office over the National Bank building before; I hadn't eyen known that Lilian Plumm was his secretary. She had been one of my pupils the first year I taught, and now she was nineteen, a year out of high school. Seeing her there, listening to her politeness as she greeted me, I felt suddenly very old and tired, and it didn't help when she said doubtfully, "I don't know whether or not Mr. Lane can see you right now — he's just signing some letters and then he's very anxious to get home."
"Tell him I'm here, anyway," I said shortly, "I think he'll see me." So Myra had called him. I was glad; there would be that much less for me to tell him.
"Oh, yes, of course!" I heard his voice, deep and strong, from the inner office, and then he was at the door, holding out his hand — smiling, but with shadows in his eyes. "Fran — it's good of you to come down here."
And so good to see him, I thought as I went into his book-lined private office. So very good, even though I must hurt him.
"I've come about Bob," I said, sitting down. There was no use in beating about the bush, trying to find an easy way to tell him.
He nodded. "Yes, what happened? Myra called me, but she couldn't tell me how he'd hurt himself. She's pretty upset, of course."
"Bob — hurt himself on purpose, Charles. So he wouldn't have to play the piano any more."
His face, always lean, seemed in that moment to go thin and gaunt. Two deep, vertical furrows appeared between his eyes, and I realized with a kind of dull horror that he was angry. "You must be mistaken, Fran," he said harshly. "Bob would never do a thing like that!"
"I'm not mistaken, Charles," I told him. "The manual training teacher saw him, and told me. And I'd guessed, even before then. Yesterday. ..." I heard my voice, like the voice of someone else, going on to tell him how Myra had forbidden Bob to play with Seamas any more — neither knowing nor caring whether Myra had already given him her version of the affair — and of Bob's outburst to me that very morning in school. I seemed to be listening to myself with Charles' ears; " I seemed to feel, in my own heart, how he tried to keep anger from ebbing away because he knew that when it was gone nothing but conviction would be left. Conviction that every word I said was the truth.
"He's not meant to be a musician,
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