already gone through a great many drawing-room flirtations, and required the help of something more piquant. He was very happy while they were all so agitated and uncomfortable. Twice a week were hospital days, at which he might hope to see her; and almost every morning now he managed to cross the path of the little school procession, and, at least see her, if he did not always catch the eye of the demure little teacher in her long cloak. Sometimes she would look at him sternly, sometimes she gave him a semi-indignant, sometimes a wholly friendly glance, sometimes, he feared, did not perceive him at all. But that was not Oswald’s fault. He made a point of taking off his hat, and indeed holding it in his hand a moment longer than was necessary, by way of showing his respect, whether she showed any signs of perceiving him or not. She went softly along the vulgar pavement, with steps which he thought he could distinguish among all the others, ringing upon the stones with a little rhythm of her own, about which he immediately wrote some verses. All this he would tell to Cara, coming to her in the morning before he set out to watch the children defiling out of the House. And all the world thought, as was natural, that the subject of these talks was his love for Cara, not his love, confided to Cara, for someone else. As for Agnes, she not only saw Oswald every time he made his appearance, whether she allowed him to know it or not, but she felt his presence in every nerve and vein, with anger for the first day or two after Roger’s visit, then with a softening of all her heart towards him as she caught his reverential glance, his eager appeal to her attention. After all, whispers to Cara, whom he had known all her life--little Cara, who even to Agnes herself seemed a child--could not mean half so much as this daily haunting of her own walks, this perpetual appearance wherever she was. That was a totally different question from her own struggle not to notice him, not to think of him. The fact that it was shocking and terrible on her part to allow her mind to dwell on any man, or any man’s attentions, while occupied in the work to which she had devoted herself, and filling almost the position of a consecrated Sister, was quite a different thing from the question whether he was a false and untrustworthy person, following her with the devices of vulgar pursuit, a thing too impious to think of, too humiliating. Agnes was anxious to acquit the man who admired and sought her, as well as determined to reject his admiration; and, for the moment, the first was actually the more important matter of the two. Herself she could be sure of. She had not put her hand to the plough merely to turn back. She was not going to abandon her ideal at the call of the first lover who held out his hand to her. Surely not; there could be no doubt on that subject; but that this generous, gentle young man, with those poetic sentiments which had