Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/106

 "Now," he said, sitting down by her with something of a sigh, "we really must, I suppose, begin on that tiresome pyramid."

They had a gay session there under the trees before the light began to fail, while each, by instructing the other, succeeded in mastering all former difficulties. In the end they fell to firing rapid questions at each other, Betsey trying to trip David in his fluent statement of the theorem, he in turn lying in wait for her on obscure points of the proof, until neither could be shaken from the thoroughness with which knowledge was now entrenched.

"How lucky it is," said Betsey, putting down the book and leaning back with her elbow on the rim of the pool, "that each of us stuck in a different place! I hope it will often be that way and that we can help each other more. Now why—" her method of finding things out was apt to be by blunt questioning, a habit she could not easily put aside, "why are you getting ready for college all alone when it is so much easier to do it by going to school?"

David stretched his long legs in the grass and looked fixedly down into the water.

"I was nearly ready to go two years ago," he explained, "but I left school instead and began to work, since I was too young to go to war. I have no father and things were not going very well with