So Herminia gave way.  Sadly against her will she gave way.  One morning in early March, she absented herself from her place in the class-room without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls, whom she had tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a rational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to write a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted Miss Smith-Waters.  She sat down to it with a sigh; for Miss Smith-Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one narrow chink, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been really fond and proud of Herminia.  She had rather shown her off, indeed, as a social trump card to the hesitating parent,—­“This is our second mistress, Miss Barton; you know her father, perhaps; such an excellent man, the Dean of Dunwich.”  And now, Herminia sat down with a heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowal she had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast, and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of ever appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her, Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.

But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately, sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence.  She told Miss Smith-Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Waters should know; but she said it with such daintiness that even that conventionalized and hide-bound old maid couldn’t help feeling and recognizing the purity and nobility of her misguided action.  Poor child, Miss Smith-Waters thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly and grievously mistaken; but, then, ’twas her heart that misled her, no doubt; and Miss Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of a far-away time when she herself too possessed some rudimentary fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the poor girl’s letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and vexation.  Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be expected to understand that if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degree wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, she could never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hers to hurry her into it.  For Herminia’s devotion to principle was not less but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters’s own; only, as it happened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite.

Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss Smith-Waters’s disappointment.  That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices.  It is the good, indeed, who are most against you.  Still, Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple truth,—­how, for the right’s sake and