Again I was silent. The one thing a child cannot do is explain a complicated situation, even to another child. How could I hope to make Elizabeth understand that, eager to worship at some shrine, I had chosen Isabel Summers with a deliberation that boded ill for my fidelity. She was a thin, blue-eyed girl, with a delicate purity of outline, and heavy braids of beautiful fair hair. Her loveliness, her sensitive temperament, her early and tragic death (she was drowned the following summer), enshrined her sweetly in our memories. She became one of the traditions of the school, and we told her tale--as of another Virginia--to all new-comers. But in the early days when I laid my heart at her feet, I knew only that she had hair like pale sunshine, and that, for a First Cours girl, she was strangely tolerant of my attentions. If I ventured to offer her the dozen chestnuts that had rewarded an hour's diligent search, she thanked me for them with a smile. If I darned her stockings with painstaking neatness,--a privilege solicited from Sister O'Neil, who had the care of our clothes,--she sometimes went so far as to commend my work. I felt that I was blessed beyond my comrades (Ella Holrook snubbed Tony, and Antoinette Mayo ignored Lilly's existence), yet there were moments when I detected a certain insipidity in the situation. It lacked the incentive of impediment. Then in November, Julia Reynolds, who had been absent, I know not why, returned to school; and I realized the difference between cherishing a tender passion and being consumed by one, between fanning a flame and being burned. To make all this clear to Elizabeth, who was passion proof, lay far beyond my power. When she said,-- "Holy Saint Francis! what a change is here," --or words to that effect,--I had not even Romeo's feeble excuses to offer, though I was as obstinate as Romeo in clinging to my new love. Tony supported me, having a roving fancy of her own, and being constant to Ella Holrook, only because that imperious graduate regarded her as an intolerable nuisance.