Annie advanced to meet me, blushing sweetly.  She had put a finishing touch to the magenta costume by a large pink moss rosebud.  She looked at it with admiration.

“Me and my young man have changed nosegays,” she remarked simply; “he asked me to give him my primroses, and he gave me this.  They do grow beautiful roses up at Fuller’s.”

“Your what?” said I dismayed.  “Who did you say?”

“My young man,” repeated Annie; “Edward Fuller, from the next farm.  He and me have been keeping company since Christmas only, but I’ve known him all my life.  We always sat together in school; he used to do my sums for me, and I’ve got still a box full of slate pencil ends which he had touched.”

So my card castle came to the cloth.  Here was a genuine case of true idyllic boy and girl love, that had strengthened and ripened with mature years.  Annie had no more given me a thought—­what an ass, what an idiot I am!  But really, I think Catherine’s cruelty has turned my brain.  I am become ready to plunge into any folly.

And it would have been folly.  After the first second’s surprise and mortification, I felt my spirits rise with a leap.  I was suddenly dragged back from moral suicide.  The fascinating temptation was placed for ever beyond my reach.  And it was Edward Fuller who thus saved me!  Good young man!  I fall upon your neck in spirit, and kiss you like a brother.

I am still free! who knows what to-morrow may bring.

April 14.—­To-morrow is here and has brought a letter from Catherine.  I find it lying by my plate when I come down to breakfast.  I take it up, look at the superscription, partly in Catherine’s well-known writing, partly in my landlady’s spider scrawl—­for it had gone first to my London rooms.  I turn it over, feel it, decide it contains one sheet of paper only, and put it resolutely down.  After breakfast is time enough to read it; nothing she can say shall ever move me more.

I pour out my coffee; my resolutions waver and dissipate themselves like the steam rising from my cup.  I tear the letter open, and find myself in Heaven straightway.  And these are the winged words that bore me there:—­

“Why do you not come and see me?  Why are you so blind?  It is true I do not like you!  But I love you with all my heart.  Ah! could you not guess? did you not know?”

“PROCTORISED.”

What a ghostly train from the forgotten past rises before me as I write the word that heads this sketch!  The memory dwells again upon that terrible quarter of an hour in the Proctor’s antechamber, where the brooding demon of “fine” and “rustication” seemed to dwell, and where the disordered imagination so clearly traced above the door Dante’s fearful legend—­Abandon hope all ye that enter here.

How eagerly each delinquent scanned the faces of his fellow-victims as they came forth from the Proctorial presence, vainly trying to gather from their looks some forecast of his impending fate; and how jealously (if a “senior”) he eyed the freshman who was going to plead a first offence!