Ishmael Worth could very well afford to practice forbearance towards these ill-conditioned lads.  He was no longer the poor, sickly, and self-doubting child he had been but a year previous.  Though still delicate as to his physique, it was with an elegant, refined rather than a feeble and sickly delicacy.  He grew very much like his father, who was one of the handsomest men of his day; but it was from his mother that he derived his sweet voice and his beautiful peculiarity of smiling only with his eyes.  His school-life had, besides, taught him more than book learning; it had taught him self-knowledge.  He had been forced to measure himself with others, and find out his relative moral and intellectual standing.  His success at school, and the appreciation he received from others, had endowed him with a self-respect and confidence easily noticeable in the modest dignity and grace of his air and manner.  In these respects also his deportment formed a favorable contrast to the shame-faced, half-sullen, and half-defiant behavior of the Burghes.  These boys were the only enemies Ishmael possessed in the school; his sweetness of spirit had, on the contrary, made him many friends.  He was ever ready to do any kindness to anyone; to give up his own pleasure for the convenience of others; to help forward a backward pupil, or to enlighten a dull one.  This goodness gained him grateful partisans among the boys; but he had, also, disinterested ones among the girls.

Claudia and Beatrice were his self-constituted little lady-patronesses.

The Burghes did not dare to sneer at Ishmael’s humble position in their presence.  For, upon the very first occasion that Alfred had ventured a sarcasm at the expense of Ishmael in her hearing, Claudia had so shamed him for insulting a youth to whose bravery he was indebted for his life, that even Master Alfred had had the grace to blush, and ever afterward had avoided exposing himself to a similar scorching.

In this little world of the schoolroom there was a little unconscious drama beginning to be performed.

I said that Claudia and Beatrice had constituted themselves the little lady-patronesses of the poor boy.  But there was a difference in their manner towards their protege.

The dark-eyed, dark-haired, imperious young heiress patronized him in a right royal manner, trotting him out, as it were, for the inspection of her friends, and calling their attention to his merits—­so surprising in a boy of his station; very much, I say, as she would have exhibited the accomplishments of her dog, Fido, so wonderful in a brute! very much, ah! as duchesses patronize promising young poets.

This was at times so humiliating to Ishmael that his self-respect must have suffered terribly, fatally, but for Beatrice.

The fair-haired, blue-eyed, and gentle Bee had a much finer, more delicate, sensitive, and susceptible nature than her cousin; she understood Ishmael better, and sympathized with him more than Claudia could.  She loved and respected him as an elder brother, and indeed more than she did her elder brothers; for he was much superior to both in physical, moral, and intellectual beauty.  Bee felt all this so deeply that she honored in Ishmael her ideal of what a boy ought to be, and what she wished her brothers to become.