An unopened coffer of things to be said in defence of—­no, on behalf of—­no, in honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, perhaps to the convincing of Aminta, Lady Ormont, was glanced at; a sentence or two leapt out and stepped forward, and had to retire.  He preferred to the fathering of tricky, windy phrases, the being undervalued—­even by her.  He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric bedevils, the vindication of the clouded, especially in the case of a disesteemed Profession requiring one to raise it and impose it upon the antagonistic senses for the bewildering of the mind.  One has to sound it loudly; there is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity.  And Weyburn was Cuper’s Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech—­always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops.

He kept his coffer shut; and, for a consequence, he saw the contents as an avenue of blossom leading to vistas of infinite harvest.

She was Lady Ormont:  Aminta shared the title of his old hero!  He refused to speculate upon how it had come to pass, and let the curtain hang, though dramas and romances, with the miracles involved in them, were agitated by a transient glimpse at the curtain.

Well! and he hoped to be a member of the Profession she despised:  hoped it with all his heart.  And one good effect of his giving his heart to the hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even from pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events.  Blessed antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of the schoolmaster’s tasks—­bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.  Away fly the boys in sheaves.  After his toil with them, to instruct, restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into the world and are gone.  Will he see them again?  It is a flickering perhaps.  To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he must be sore of his having charged them with good matter.  How can the man do it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself to dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable beautiful eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed, and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow that was handy?  Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.