‘French day!’ said Calliani, hearing their cries.  Then he bellowed ‘Matthew!—­Giulio !’

A lusty inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel returned his hail.  The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry in the distance.  Here were lungs!  Here were sprites!

Lord Ormont bethought him of the name of the master.  ’Mr. Matthew, I think you said, sir,’ he was observing to Calliani, as the master came nearer; and Calliani replied:  ’His Christian name.  But if the boys are naughty boys, it is not the privilege.  Mr. Weyburn.’

There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on the rush to his friend.

Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting.  Neither of them flinched in eye or limb.

At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood.  Her colour was the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought:  ‘It has come!’ Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.

The two men conversed.  There was no gesture.

This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may still be; her soul being with one.  And that one, dearer than the blood of her body, imperilled by her.

She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp.  She would ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of doom.  An incessant clamour dinned about her:  ‘It has come!’

The two men walked conversing into the school-house.  She was unconscious of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her mind believed she knew a friend in him.  The two disappeared.  She was insensible stone, except for the bell-clang:  ‘It has come’; until they were in view again, still conversing:  and the first of her thought to stir from petrifaction was:  ‘Life holds no secret.’

She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force herself to think:  and had, for a chastising result, a series of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of the situation, not communicably.  The most vivid and persistent was a triangle.  Interpret who may.  The one beheld the two pass from view again, still conversing.

They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate.  He of the grey head poised high has gone.

Her arm was pressed by a hand.  Weyburn longed to enfold her, and she desired it, and her soul praised him for refraining.  Both had that delicacy.

‘You have seen, my darling,’ Weyburn said.  ’It has come, and we take our chance.  He spoke not one word, beyond the affairs of the school.  He has a grandnephew in want of a school:  visited the dormitories, refectory, and sheds:  tasted the well-water, addressed me as Mr. Matthew.  He had it from Giulio.  Came to look at the school of Giulio’s “friend Matthew,”:  —­you hear him.  Giulio little imagines!—­Well, dear love, we stand with a squad in front, and wait the word.  It mayn’t be spoken.  We have counted long before that something like it was bound to happen.  And you are brave.  Ruin’s an empty word for us two.’