He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and
more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply. What few
remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly all concerned the
landscape, which he commended repeatedly in a weak voice, as "kind of
pretty," though once he said he guessed there might be bugs in the bark
of a log on which they sat; and he became so immoderately personal as to
declare that if the bugs had to get on anybody he'd rather they got on
him than on Milla. She said that was "just perfectly lovely" of him,
asked where he got his sweet nature, and in other ways encouraged him to
continue the revelation, but Ramsey was unable to get forward with it,
though he opened and closed his mouth a great many times in the effort
to do so.
At five o'clock everybody was summoned again to the rendezvous for a
ceremony preliminary to departure: the class found itself in a large
circle, standing, and sang "The Star Spangled Banner." Ordinarily, on
such an open-air and out-of-school occasion, Ramsey would have joined
the chorus uproariously with the utmost blatancy of which his vocal
apparatus was capable; and most of the other boys expressed their humour
by drowning out the serious efforts of the girls; but he sang feebly,
not much more than humming through his teeth.
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