Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/51

 out of the window, counting unseen things on her fingers, and drawing up fictitious documents demanding the return of the Fortune of the Indies to her rightful owners. These documents she wrote with many flourishes and ornamented with large seals executed in red and blue crayon—all openly, without even the pretense of a sheltering geography book. Her lessons she recited in a half-hearted manner—what she knew of them—and seemed to care not at all for her teacher's remonstrances.

But Mrs. Titcomb was a wise old lady, after all. She kept Jane after school one day to finish a problem, and, when all the others had clattered out into the sunshine of Ash Street, summoned her to the window. Mrs. Titcomb had no hard-and-fast rule for the place from which she directed her school. She might sit at her dark old desk where she kept her ebony ruler and silver bell, or she was just as likely to be found sitting in a high-backed splint chair by the window, knitting, with a book on her knee and her keen eyes watching her class above the flickering needles. So to the chair by the window Jane went.