She had a sudden quick yearning for one more glimpse of the old schoolhouse before it passed out of her life forever. She leaned forward and stretched her neck to look back, catching only a far flash of the old gray stone building; then the long low shed where they parked their bicycles hid it from view till the tall hedge wiped it out entirely. They went around another curve, and the old life was gone, gone!

She closed her eyes, and the big sunny room of her school days flashed into her vision again. She saw the long aisles. The long pleasant stretch of blackboards, with windows at intervals, the neat separate desks. How interesting it had all seemed to her! How she used to love to describe it to her mother when she came home.

She saw again the rows of students, heads bent to books, others staring around and smiling. There was the first row; during her last year, Annette Howells was in the front seat, because she always needed watching, Rose had thought. She never was still. She seldom studied. She was pretty and knew it, and was always trying to attract the attention of the boys across the aisle.

Behind her was Caroline Goodson, a solid, solemn girl, overgrown, and slow of mind. Annette would never bother to chatter to her. Then Shirley Pettigrew, so pretty, and so well dressed. Who sat next? Oh, Jennie Carew, and those girls from South Addison Street. Then up to the front row her mind jumped again. Mary Fithian, then Fannie Heatherow, and then herself.

She went down the line behind her, and wasn’t sure of some names. She hadn’t been one who turned around much.

The third aisle was all boys. Johnny Peters, Harry Fitch—how they used to carry on whenever the teacher’s back was turned as she wrote on the blackboard! And next was Gordon McCarroll across the aisle from herself. Everybody liked him. Everybody had a smile and a cheerful word for him.

Gordon belonged to a wealthy family. He might have gone to an expensive school, but it was whispered that his father preferred the public school. And certainly Gordon never acted as if he were trying to be better than anybody else. He had a genial way with him that showed he counted himself one with them all. Rose was naturally shy, and she rarely went to the school parties, or she would have known him better, she supposed. But though she did not know him well, she had great respect for his bright mind and his straightforward, manly attitude. Of course he had always said “Hello!” to her when he came to his seat in the mornings, but that was about all the contact they had ever had. No—there was the day she had been asked by the teacher to read her essay before the class, and they had clapped so enthusiastically. Gordon had looked up as she came back to her seat and said in a low clear voice, “Swell!” There had been a look in his nice gray eyes that she had not forgotten. That had been the extent of their acquaintance.

Yet now, as the memory of the last year of her school life came so keenly to her heart, his was the only face that stood out vividly.

It was ridiculous, of course, because she didn’t really know him at all, and all the fancied virtues she had put upon him might be from herself, and only figments of her imagination. Yet, of them all, he was the only one she felt she would truly miss. Of course she never would have had the opportunity to be real friends with him, even if she stayed in Shandon.