Back at his desk again, Wolf was compelled to bestow so much attention upon his boys that it was only once in all the afternoon that he fixed his eyes upon the mark on the wall, and gave himself up to his sullen meditations.

“This is the kind of thing,” he thought, “that I’ve got to endure for the rest of my days, unless Mother, with her teashop money, pensions me off! I could bear it! I know well enough I could bear it, if only⁠—It’s nice making Gerda laugh. It’s nice doing what Christie tells me. But it’ll be hard to go on in this room for thirty years.”

He had occasion to denounce a couple of boys, ere the lesson was over, for a flagrant case of cribbing; and the way in which the elder of these boys⁠—a great hulking lubber-head called Gaffer Barge⁠—took all the blame upon himself, struck his imagination far more than he permitted that poor, sweet-natured lout to discover! When the clock finally struck the hour, and he found himself free, he stopped Gaffer Barge as the lad was slouching off.