BUT, during the week that followed, Traill's good-temper slowly reasserted itself once more. After all, it was really impossible to be angry with anyone when the world was alight and trembling with so wonderful an adventure. They had each of them written to those in authority. Isabel had a complacent father who knew something of young Traill's family and, answering at once, said that he would come down to see them and made it his only stipulation that the engagement should last for at least a year, until they were both a little older. Traill's mother was delighted with anything that could give her son such happiness. It had all been very sudden of course; but then, was not true love always like that? Had not she, a great many years ago, fallen in love with Archie's father “all in a minute,” and was not that the beautiful incautious way that the new practical generation seemed so often to forget? So, she sent him her blessing and also wrote a little note to Isabel. But they still kept their secret from the others. They meant every day to reveal it, but they shrank, as each morning came, from all the talk and chatter that would at once follow. It would mean an end, Isabel knew, to any easy and pleasant relations that she might have with anyone at the school. She never understood the reason, but she knew that they would feel that she had acted in a conceited, presuming manner. It would not be pleasant. So their meetings were, during these days, few and difficult. They met in the wood and at the sea, and their eyes crossed over the chapel floor, and they even wrote to one another and posted them elaborately in the letter-box. But on any morning the secret might be revealed. Traill told Isabel about his quarrel with Perrin, and she urged him to make it up. “When we ourselves are so happy,” she said, “we can't quarrel with anyone—and, poor man, no wonder his temper is irritable. He's a miserably disappointed man, and I don't think he's very well either. He looks dreadfully white and strained sometimes. We can afford to put up with some ill-temper from other people, Archie, just now. When we are so happy and he is so unhappy, it is a little unfair, isn't it?” And so he kissed her and went back resolved to be pleasant and agreeable. But Perrin gave him no opportunity. They spoke to each other a little at meals for appearance' sake, but any advances that Traill made were cut short at once without hesitation. Perrin passed about the passages and the class-rooms during this week heavily, with a white face and a lowering brow—he had headaches, bad headaches; and his form suffered. II.