‘But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?’ Selina interposed.

‘Ah, yes; she is not yet found!’

’Would it increase their mutual respect?—­or show of respect, if you like?’ said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell of a city’s insurrection in her breast.

’In time, under management; catching and grouping them young.  A boy who sees a girl do what he can’t, and would like to do, won’t take refuge in his muscular superiority—­which, by the way, would be lessened.’

‘You suppose their capacities are equal?’

’Things are not equal.  I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty nearly equal sum in the end.  But we ’re not weighing them each.  The question concerns the advantage of both.’

‘That seems just!’

Aminta threw no voice into the word ‘just.’  It was the word of the heavens assuaging earth’s thirst, and she was earth to him.  Her soul yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.

She said to Selina:  ’We must plan an expedition next year or the year after, and see how the school progresses.’

All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta’s hand shyly.  Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.

Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine robes.  He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit.  Warmly it was given.  ‘We will; we will indeed!’

‘I shall look forward,’ he said.

There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the passing minute that slipped when seized.  The looking forward turned them to the looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories, which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of hands.  Desire of it destroyed it.  They swung to the future, swung to the present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could not hold.  They were lovers.  Divided lovers in presence, they thought and they felt in pieces.  Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech.  She dared look the very little of her heart’s fulness, without the disloyalty it would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be seen.  While her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her fettered state, her sense of unworthiness muffled in the deeps, would keep her from the loosening to passion.

He who read through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that security.  His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood, was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her.  This was the truth in a better-ordered world:  she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her work.  But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth:  and keeping passion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as pertained to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might continue to walk in the ranks of the sober citizens.