The little procession began to move off, Polkinghorne and Carminow, the two biggest, carrying Doughty on their crossed hands, and progressing with a slow sideways motion, trying not to stumble over the uneven ground.  Killigrew ran on ahead to warn the matron and urge her to silence, in case the injury might turn out to be but slight after all.

A miserable loneliness fell upon Ishmael.  He had won, and none of the sweets of victory were his.  He lagged behind.  There was a rustle at his side, and Hilaria’s hands were round his arm.

“What on earth—­” he began—­angry, confused, aware that tears were burning in his eyes.

“Don’t be cross....  I had to stay.  I was up on the boulders.  Oh, Ishmael, have you killed him?”

The question jangled his frightened nerves, and he answered sharply, telling her he neither knew nor cared, even while he was shaking with the fear lest what she suggested might be true.  “I’ll say something to those youngsters for having let you stay,” he added, catching sight of Polkinghorne minor and Moss, where they hesitated in the shadows.

“As though they could have prevented me!” she said, with swift scorn.  He looked at her more closely, struck by a something strange about her, and saw that her skirts no longer swelled triumphantly on either side, but fell limply, and so long that she had to hold them up when she took a step forward by his side.

“I couldn’t climb on the boulders in it,” she said, answering his look.  “I made the boys turn their backs and I took it off.”

“Well, I imagine you can’t go home without it,” said Ishmael wearily.  He supposed he would have to see her home, for it was already past the time for the younger boys to be in.  He felt he hated girls and the bother that they were.

“Cut off in, you two,” he ordered; “and mind, if you blab about Hilaria having been here I’ll baste you.”

They promised eagerly, and Hilaria thanked him in a subdued voice.  She went through the darkness to where she had left her crinoline.  They found it lying, wet with dew, a prostrate system of ugly rings, held together by webbing.  It looked incredibly naked, a hollow mockery of the portentous dome it had stood for in the eyes of the world.

He slung it over one shoulder without a word, inwardly resenting bitterly the touch of the ludicrous it gave to the evening’s happenings, and almost silently he went with the stumbling girl towards the town, only leaving her at the corner of her lane.  She thanked him with a new shyness, and taking the cumbrous emblem of her inferiority over her left arm, held out her strong hard little right hand to him.

“Don’t think it horrid of me to have stayed,” she pleaded.  “It was that I so wanted you to win ...  I was afraid ...”

“It was very—­very unladylike,” began Ishmael, then paused.  Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike....  Now he had become a man, with a man’s dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind.  Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother.  She urged her own cause no more.