From some half-shadowed corner directly in front of him a distinctly Continental smile flared up on a French instructor's face. Close at his elbow the phrase "little sly, pink-faced minx" hissed plainly from one gossip to another. The blood was surging in his ears! His heart was pounding like an [44] engine! Shock, bewilderment, nausea itself, racked chaotically through all his senses! Yet neither love nor loyalty, a girl's honor or a man's dignity, seemed to him at that moment to be essentially served by capping sensationalism with sensationalism. Sophisticated as he was in all the finer knowledges that book or life could offer, afraid of nothing on earth except the vulgarity of publicity, shy of nothing on earth except his great, grown-man desire for this little, young, exquisite girl, no power in the world could have forced him then and there to take the sweetest news he had ever known, or ever was to know, it would seem, and slop it down like so much kerosene to feed a flame already quite noxious enough. Still fighting desperately for time, still parrying for enlightenment, he kept his mask-like face turned blankly towards his companions. "I protest!" he repeated tenaciously. "There is some mistake--some misunderstanding! Even in the two short months Miss Bretton has been with us she has certainly--Certainly----" In a voice as low as a nun's but particularly and peculiarly enunciative [45] he focused suddenly on the President. "The charge is absurd," he said. "It's outrageous! Someone has lied of course! And lied very badly." With an ill-concealed gesture of exasperation the President straightened up in her chair and glared at her youngest professor. "I--am the only person--who could have 'lied,'" she affirmed with some hauteur. Slowly into her cold strong-featured face a hot flush ebbed and waned again through lips that crisped a bit round the edges of her words. "If you _insist_ on knowing every detail, Mr. Burnarde," she said, "it was I myself who discovered Miss Bretton! And she was barefooted at the time--and in her nightdress--and clasped most emphatically in the young man's arms."