ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
I were studying Canadian history, you know, while all the while I was revelling in ‘Ben Hur.’ I was so interested in it that I never noticed Miss Stacy coming down the aisle until all at once I just looked up and there she was looking down at me, so reproachful like. I can’t tell you how ashamed I felt, Marilla, especially when I heard Josie Pye giggling. Miss Stacy took ‘Ben Hur’ away, but she never said a word then. She kept me in at recess and talked to me. She said I had done very wrong in two respects. First, I was wasting the time I ought to have put on my studies; and secondly I was deceiving my teacher in trying to make it appear I was reading a history when it was a story-book instead. I had never realized until that moment, Marilla, that what I was doing was deceitful. I was shocked. I cried bitterly, and asked Miss Stacy to forgive me and I’d never do such a thing again; and I offered to do penance by never so much as looking at ‘Ben Hur’ for a whole week, not even to see how the chariot-race turned out. But Miss Stacy said she wouldn’t require that, and she forgave me freely. So I think it wasn’t very kind of her to come up here to you about it after all.”
“Miss Stacy never mentioned such a thing to me, Anne, and it’s only your guilty conscience that’s the matter with you. You have no business to be taking story-books to school. You read too many novels anyhow. When I was a girl I wasn’t so much as allowed to look at a novel.”
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