was a large oriel-window of stained glass, the gift of the founder.  Rays of gold and green and blue and crimson light filtered through, over the assembling school.  Maria saw Evelyn with her face turned towards the platform eagerly watching.  She was not looking at Maria, but was evidently expecting the advent of the new principal.  It did not at that time occur to Maria to attribute any serious meaning to the girl’s attitude.  She merely felt a sort of impatience with her, concerning her attitude, when she herself knew what she knew.

Suddenly a sort of suppressed stir was evident among those of the pupils who were seated.  Maria felt a breeze from an open door, and knew that Wollaston had entered.  He spoke first to her, calling her by name, and bidding her good-morning, then to the other teachers.  The others were either residents of Westbridge, or boarded there, and he had evidently been introduced to them before.  Then he took his seat, and waited quietly for the pupils to become seated.  It lacked only a few minutes of the time for opening the school.  It was not long before the seats were filled, and Maria heard Wollaston’s voice reading a selection from the Bible.  Then she bent her head, and heard him offering prayer.  She felt a sort of incredulity now.  It seemed to her inconceivable that the boy whom she had known could be actually conducting the opening exercises of a school with such imperturbability and self-possession.  All at once a great pride of possession seized her.  She glanced covertly at him between her fingers.  The secret which had been her shame suddenly filled her with the possibility of pride.  Wollaston Lee, standing there, seemed to her the very grandest man whom she had ever seen.  He was undoubtedly handsome, and he had, moreover, power.  When he had finished his prayer, and had begun his short address to the scholars, she glanced at him again, and saw what splendid shoulders he had, how proudly he held his head, and yet what a boyish ingenuousness went with it all.  Maria did not look at Evelyn at all.  Had she done so, she would have been startled.  Evelyn was gazing at the new principal with the utmost unreserve, the unreserve of awakened passion which does not know itself because of innocence and ignorance.  Evelyn, gazing at the young man, had never been so unconscious of herself, and at the same time she had never been so conscious.  She felt a life to which she had been hitherto a stranger tingling through every vein and nerve of her young body, through every emotion of her young soul.  She gazed with wide-open eyes like a child, the rose flush deepened on her cheeks, her parted lips became moist and deep crimson, pulses throbbed in her throat.  She smiled involuntarily, a smile of purest delight and admiration.  Love twofold had awakened within her emotional nature.  Love of herself, as she might be seen in another’s eyes, and love of another.  And yet she did not know it was love, and she felt no shame, and no fright, nothing but rapture.  She was in the broad light of the present, under the direct rays of a firmament of life and love.  Another girl, Addie Hemingway, who was no older than Evelyn, but shrewd beyond her years, with a taint of coarseness, noticed her, and nudged the girl at her right.  “Just look at Evelyn Edgham,” she whispered.