Still they thronged; heavy work of strangling had to be done.  Her tone of disappointment with the schoolmaster bit him, and it flattered him.  The feelings leapt alive, equally venomous from the wound and the caress.  They pushed to see, had to be repelled from seeing, the girl Browny in the splendid woman; they had lightning memories:  not the pain of his grip could check their voice on the theme touching her happiness or the reverse.  And this was an infernal cunning.  He paused perforce to inquire, giving them space for the breeding of their multitudes.  Was she happy?  Did she not seem too meditative, enclosed, toneless, at her age?  Vainly the persecuted fellow said to himself:  “But what is it to me now?”—­The Browny days were over.  The passion for the younger Aminta was over—­buried; and a dream of power belonging to those days was not yet more than visionary.  It had moved her once, when it was a young soldier’s.  She treated the schoolmaster’s dream as vapour, and the old days as dead and ghostless.  She did rightly.  How could they or she or he be other than they were!

With that sage exclamation, he headed into the Browny days and breasted them; and he had about him the living foamy sparkle of the very time, until the Countess of Ormont breathed the word “Schoolmaster”; when, at once, it was dusty land where buoyant waters had been, and the armies of the facts, in uniform drab, with some feathers and laces, and a significant surpliced figure, decorously covering the wildest of Cupids, marched the standard of the winking gold-piece, which is their nourishing sun and eclipser of all suns that foster dreams.

As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and round and round he went, lucky to float.

His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.  She despised it; he upheld it.  He stuck to his view, finding their antagonism on the subject wholesome for him.  All that she succeeded in doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which Matey Weyburn set his aim.  Her contempt of it, whether as a profession in itself or as one suitable to the former young enthusiast for arms, dwarfed it to appear like the starved plants under Greenland skies.  But those are of a sturdy genus; they mean to live; they live, perforce, of the right to live; they will prove their right in a coming season, when some one steps near and wonders at them, and from more closely observing; gets to understand, learning that the significance and the charm of earth will be as well shown by them as by her tropical fair flaunters or the tenderly-nurtured exotics.