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Dally's reception. He is a traveling salesman for this house," she pointed to the notice on the envelope. "He wants me to go to the theatre with him, and I expect to go. Mrs. Dally says he is a very nice young man. We we have been out a number of times." And the girl blushed again. "I know some parties connected with that firm. What's the young man's name, Letty?" "Mr. Tom Ostrello." "Indeed!
He felt sure that it must be something wonderful, and he had odd moments of almost being on the verge of grasping it, but in the end it always eluded him, and no sooner was he out of Dally's presence than the whole thing seemed very unreal and foolish. Young Davidson had a bent toward sarcasm that sometimes lured him out of his usual cold aloofness.
"Humph," was Dally's only audible comment as he made a note, but he looked as if he had tasted something unpleasant. "And you, Wellander," asked the teacher. "I am going to be an explorer," replied Keith without moment's hesitation, and the whole class broke into a roar of laughter with Dally joining them. Keith, as usual, blushed a deep crimson, but did not move.
"And what does your father say about it," was Dally's next question. There was a long pause broken only by some gigglings by the irrepressibles down at the bottom of the class. "I have not asked him," Keith admitted at last. "But I am going to be an explorer just the same." "In these days that means you have to become a scientist," Dally remarked in a changed tone.
Suddenly a twig was heard to snap in the thicket before him. Next moment the striped black and yellow skin of a leopard, or Cape tiger, appeared in the opening where he had expected to behold a deer. Dally's gun flew to his shoulder. At the same instant the leopard skin was thrown back, and the right arm of a tall athletic Kafir was bared. The hand grasped a light assagai, or darting spear.
And like them, he felt that the instruction had become a mere humdrum routine enabling a certain number of boys to get the proper marks at the end of a certain number of months. What had lured him on as an adventure had turned into a tedious grind. And more and more he drifted back into a dream world of his own out of which he had been dragged by Dally's good-humoured jibes.
"Why, mamma," cried Keith, disturbed by the emotional appeal back of her words, "what has that to do with my not wanting to be laughed at by other boys?" "I almost wish I hadn't persuaded your father to send you to the public school," the mother rejoined. The school year was drawing to its close again Dally's tone grew less bantering.
"It is your only chance, and so I advise you to choose Latin. It is what I think a boy with your head should take anyhow." "All right, Sir," assented Keith, flattered by the last part of Dally's remark and utterly ignorant of what his choice implied.
But this opinion he never dared to put into words. To do so in the face of Dally's clearly manifested reverence would have been like openly confessing a particularly degrading form of inferiority. Nor did it seem to matter so very much what he studied.
Gertrude had come into Dally's tent to fetch Junkie to her father when Sandy Black and his friends entered, but Junkie had just touched the hot teapot, with the contents of which Mrs Scholtz was regaling herself and husband, and was not in an amiable humour. His outcries were deafening. "Now do hold its dear little tongue, and go to its popsy," said Mrs Scholtz tenderly.
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