’I ’m a minor personage.  I certainly did some good, and that ’s a push forward.’

‘They speak of you?’

It was Aminta more than the Countess of Ormont speaking to him.

‘You take an interest in the boys,’ he said, glowing.  ’Yes, well, they have their talks.  I happened to be a cricketer, counting wickets and scores.  I don’t fancy it’s remembered that it was I preached my lord.  A day of nine wickets and one catch doesn’t die out of a school.  The boy Gowen was the prime spirit in getting up the subscription for the laundress.  But Bench and Parsons are good boys, too.’

He described them, dwelt on them.  The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring.  Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence’s absence.  She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly—­a kind of distant cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent.  Moreover, the dear boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for the moth-box.  She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the school-laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the child, little Jane, aged six.  Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water to which little Jane had given celebrity over the county.  The girl stood up to her shoulders when she slid off the bank and made the line for her brother to hold, he in the water as well.  Altogether, Cuper’s boys were justified in promoting a subscription, the mother being helpless.

‘Modest little woman,’ he said of Jane.  ’We’ll hope people won’t spoil her.  Don’t forget, Lady Ormont, that the brother did his part; he had more knowledge of the danger than she.’

’You will undertake to convey our subscriptions?  Lord Ormont spoke of the little ones and the schoolboys yesterday.’

’I’ll be down again among them next Sunday, Lady Ormont.  On the Monday I go to Olmer.’

‘The girls of High Brent subscribe?’

There was a ripple under Weyburn’s gravity.

’Messrs. Gowen, Bench, and Parsons thought proper to stop Miss Vincent at the head of her detachment in the park.’

‘On the Sunday?’

’And one of them handed her a paper containing a report of their interview with Mrs. Coop and a neat eulogy of little Jane.  But don’t suspect them, I beg.  I believe them to be good, honest fellows.  Bench, they say, is religious; Gowen has written verses; Parsons generally harum-scarum.  They’re boyish in one way or another, and that’ll do.  The cricket of the school has been low:  seems to be reviving.’

‘Mr. Weyburn,’ said the countess, after a short delay—­and Aminta broke through—­’it pleases me to hear of them, and think they have not forgotten you, or, at least, they follow the lead you gave.  I should like to know whether an idea I have is true:  Is much, I mean constant, looking down on young people likely to pull one’s mind down to their level?’