On all human beings, child or adult, emotional adventure entails, sooner or later, physical exhaustion; the deeper, the more novel the experience, the greater the drain on the bodily strength. To Louise, involved in the first passionate experience of her short life, in an affection as violent and undisciplined as a child's must be, an affection in itself completely occupying her mind and exhausting her energies, the amount of work made necessary by the position to which Clare and her own ambition had assigned her, was more of a burden than either realised. Only Alwynne, sympathetic coach (for Louise had two years' back work to condense and assimilate), guessed how great were the efforts the child was making. Clare, who always affected unconsciousness of her own effect on the ambitions of the children, had persuaded herself that Louise was entirely in her right place; and Louise herself was too young, and too feverishly happy, to consider the occasional headaches, fits of lassitude and nights cinematographed with dreams, as anything but irritating pebbles in her path to success--and Clare. The weeks in her new class had been spread with happiness--a happiness that had grown like Elijah's cloud, till, on the day of the Browning lesson, as she listened to the beloved voice making music of her halting sentences, to the words of praise, of affection even, that followed, it stretched from horizon to horizon. As she sat in the deserted class-room, her neat packet of sandwiches untasted in the satchel at her elbow, she re-lived that golden hour, dwelling on its incidents as a miser counts money. There was the stormy beginning; Agatha's mockery; her own raging helplessness; Clare's entrance; the exquisite thrill she had felt at her touch, that was not only gratitude for championship.... Never before had Clare been so near to her, so gentle, so protecting.... And afterwards, facing Louise at the foot of the table, how beautiful she had been.... Yet some of the girls could not see it.... They were fools.... Her head had been framed in the small, square window, so darkened and cobwebbed by crimson vines that only the merest blur of white clouds and blue hills was visible.... She had worn a gown of duller blue that lay in stiff folds: the bowl of Christmas roses, that mirrored themselves on the dark, polished table, had hidden the papers and the smeared ink-pot. Suddenly Louise remembered some austere Dutch Madonnas over whom delightful, but erratic Miss Durand had lingered, on their last visit to a picture gallery. She called them beautiful. Louise, with fascinated eyes sidling past a wallful of riotous Rubens, to fix on the soap and gentian of a Sasseferato, had wondered if Miss Durand were trying to be funny. She remembered, too, how some of the younger girls, comparing favourites, had called Miss Hartill ugly. She had raged loyally--yet, secretly, all but agreed. With her child's love of pink and white prettiness she had