“Never say die, Ann! Have you heard Leonie play the Moonlight?”

“No!  What’s it like?”

“Simply awful, just like Mam’zel when she thumps downstairs in her felt slippers.”

There fell a space of drowsy silence in which the girls lay back on the grass incline, and solemnly munched chocolates with youth’s delightful dissociation from anything more perplexing than the passing of the actual hour.

“No!” murmured Annie Smith, breaking the drowsy spell.  “She’s not like us—­couldn’t be with a V.C. father and India as a birthright.  But isn’t it all wonderfully mysterious?”

Dear unsophisticated soul, whose wanderlust was yearly arrested, or rather satisfied, with the summer holiday by the sea, and whose rector father acted as a weekly soporific to his congregation.

“I wonder who gave her that perfectly horrible charm?” she added sleepily.

“The ayah, I think,” came an equally sleepy answer.  “Did I tell you that I found it in the bath-room the other night?  It’s an eye—­a cat’s-eye, you know—­a perfect beast of a thing; I would swear it winked at me when I dropped it on the floor.  Anyway I left it there and simply flew out of the room to tell Leonie, and Jessica pinched, I beg Principal’s pardon, took my bath.  Ugh! and she wears it night and day—­oh! look, here she comes——­”

“Oh!” sighed plain Annie Smith, “isn’t she beautiful!”

She was!

Unaware that anyone was watching, Leonie stopped in front of a bush of red roses.  She neither touched or sniffed them; she just flung out her arms, lifted her face to the blazing sun and laughed.

The simple school frock showed the wonder of her figure, with the beautiful rounded bust, the slender waist, and the moulded limbs; the sun drew red and yellow lights out of the heavy russet hair, gold flecks out of the green eyes, and a flash of crimson from the rather full clear-cut mouth with its turned-up corners.

Her skin was like ivory with the faintest tinge of pink just on the very tip of the rather pronounced cheek-bones; her hands were small and fine, and the fingers were like pea-pods, long and slender and slightly dimpled.

And when she moved away towards the summer-house where she could see the sea, she moved not at all from her waist upwards.  She held her head and shoulders as though she had carried baskets of fruit or washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a deer, or a snake, or a bacchanalian dancer, as you will; but in any case in a way which in the present tense caused the Principal to mourn in secret, and in the future brought the condemnation of women and the eyes of men full upon her.

And behind the summer-house she leant against the wall.

“One more term,” she said, “only one more term, and then I shall be free—­free to go—­free to wander—­free to follow the voice which is calling, calling!  Only one more little term!”