There was an extraordinary air of suppressed excitement about the girl. She was white-hot and sparkling, yet cold. Indeed, she gave the impression of a sea of emotions battling beneath a floor of ice. "I've got out," she said. Panting, but fearless eyed, she went in to face her mother. Mrs. Woodburn did not seem surprised. She met her daughter's resistance with disarming quiet. "Well, Boy," she said, kissing the truant. "I'm not going back," panted the girl. Her spirit fluttered furiously as that of an escaped bird who fears recapture. "I'm not going to send you back, my dear," replied the mother. The girl put her arms about her mother's neck in a moment of rare impulse. "Oh, mother!" she sighed. She did not cry: Boy Woodburn was never known to cry. She did not faint. She very rarely fainted. But she trembled through and through. Mrs. Woodburn paid the necessary fees. The schoolmistress didn't ask to have the girl back. She admitted that she could make nothing of her. "Stuck her toes in," said Old Mat. "And I don't blame her. Can't see Boy walkin' out two be two, and hand in hand." He shook his head. "Mustn't put a blood filly in the cart, Mar," he said. "She'll only kick the caboodlum to pieces." Mrs. Woodburn made one more effort to educate her daughter on conventional lines. She introduced a governess to Putnam's. But after the girl had taken her mistress for a ride, the poor woman came to Mrs. Woodburn in tears and asked to leave. "I can't teach her the irregular verbs on horseback," she said. "And she won't learn any other way. Directly I begin on them, she starts to gallop." Mrs. Woodburn accepted the governess's notice, and tried nothing further. "She must go her own way now," she said to Mat. "It's the right way, Mar," replied the old man comfortably. "I hope so," answered his wife. "She can read, and she can write, and she can 'rithmetik,'" continued the other. "What more d'you want with this 'ere education?" He went out, shaking his head. "I sha'n't wep no tear," he said. "That I sha'n't, even if she don't get round them wriggle-regular French worms Mamsel talks of. Roast beef o' old England for me." Mrs. Woodburn announced her decision to her daughter. "Thank you, mother," said the girl quietly, and added: "It's no good--not for me." Mrs. Woodburn eyed her daughter. "You're a good maid, Boy," she said. "That's the main." A month later the girl asked her mother if she might help with the lads' Bible Class. Mrs. Woodburn consented. A year later, when the girl was sixteen, Mrs. Woodburn asked her daughter if she would take the class alone. The girl thought it over for a month. Then she said yes. In the interval she had passed through a spiritual crisis and made a great renunciation. She had resolved to put aside the dream that had dominated her inner life for seven years. CHAPTER XI Brazil Silver Boy Woodburn's calling had thrown her from early youth into contact with Eton men.