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It made her classmates only the angrier that, despite all her unpunctuality, she kept a high position in the class, even if she could never quite attain prize-rank.

But there came a week when Bloomah’s family remained astonishingly quiet and self-sufficient, and it looked as if the Banner might once again adorn the dry, scholastic room and throw a halo of romance round the blackboard.

Then a curious calamity befell. A girl who had left the school for another at the end of the previous week, returned on the Thursday, explaining that her parents had decided to keep her in the old school. An indignant heart-cry broke through all the discipline:

‘Teacher, don’t have her!’

From Bloomah burst the peremptory command: ‘Go back, Sarah!’

For the unlucky children felt that her interval would now be reckoned one of absence. And they were right. Sarah reduced the gross attendance by six, and the Banner was lost.

Yet to have been so near incited them to a fresh spurt. Again the tantalizing Thursday was reached before their hopes were dashed. This time the break-down was even crueller, for every pinafored pupil, not excluding Bloomah, was in her place, red-marked.

Upon this saintly company burst suddenly Bloomah’s mother, who, ignoring the teacher, and pointing her finger dramatically at her daughter, cried:

‘Bloomah Beckenstein, go home!’

Bloomah’s face became one large red mark, at which all the other girls’ eyes were directed. Tears of humiliation and distress dripped down her cheeks over the dark rings. If she were thus hauled off ere she had received two hours of secular instruction, her attendance would be cancelled.

The class was all in confusion. ‘Fold arms!’ cried the teacher sharply, and the girls sat up rigidly. Bloomah obeyed instinctively with the rest.

‘Bloomah Beckenstein, do you want me to pull you out by your plait?’

‘Mrs. Beckenstein, really you mustn’t come here like that!’ said the teacher in her most ladylike accents.

‘Tell Bloomah that,’ answered Mrs. Beckenstein, unimpressed. ‘She’s come here by runnin’ away from home. There’s nobody but her to see to things, for we are all broken in our bones from dancin’ at a weddin’ last night, and comin’ home at four in the mornin’, and pourin’ cats and dogs. If you go to our house, please, teacher, you’ll see my Benjy in bed; he’s given up his day’s work; he must have his sleep; he earns three pounds a week as head cutter at S. Cohn’s–he can afford to be in bed, thank God! So now, then, Bloomah Beckenstein! Don’t they teach you here: “Honour thy father and thy mother”?’

Poor Bloomah rose, feeling vaguely that fathers and mothers should not dishonour their children. With hanging head she moved to the door, and burst into a passion of tears as soon as she got outside.

After, if not in consequence of, this behaviour, Mrs. Beckenstein broke her leg, and lay for weeks with the limb cased in plaster-of-Paris. That finished the chances of the Banner for a long time. Between nursing and house management Bloomah could scarcely ever put in an attendance.

So heavily did her twin troubles weigh upon the sensitive child day and night that she walked almost with a limp, and dreamed of her name in the register with ominous rows of black ciphers; they stretched on and on to infinity–in vain did she turn page after page in the hope of a red mark; the little black eggs became larger and larger, till at last horrid horned insects began to creep from them and scramble all over her, and she woke with creeping flesh. Sometimes she lay swathed and choking in the coils of a Black Banner.

And, to add to these worries, the School Board officer hovered and buzzed around, threatening summonses.

But at last she was able to escape to her beloved school. The expected scowl of the room was changed to a sigh of relief; extremes meet, and her absence had been so prolonged that reproach was turned to welcome.