The long hair was woven through and through his thoughts; but not as a disturbing, upheaving element. The girl made him waste a great deal of time, but nothing else--not the life of his heart. Because of her good-nature, her entire want of coquetry or perverseness, his feeling for her complicated itself in nowise; rather it grew simpler as it insensibly changed. His wonder and fine dread at feminine appurtenances had worn away a little with increased familiarity; he reposed on that fact as if it had been such an one as becoming accustomed to the noise of guns. He felt under delicate obligations to her for having routed his shyness, and not at all tormented him in any of the thousand ways he apprehended a feminine being would have at her command. As he was less and less in awe of her and that suspected arsenal, though a charming, fearful element went out of his sentiment, his affection perhaps grew more. She made such a good little comrade! Insidiously, she connected herself in his mind with future days--she who cared only for the day and the pleasure thereof. When he spoke of a thing it would be pleasant to do, a place pleasant to visit, he said, always unreflectingly, yet from a sincere heart: "Some day we must go there. Let us do such a thing some time." When he described the hills and ponds of home, he said what they might have done had she been there last summer or the years before, how they might have rowed and rambled. He painted the good time they might have together, in some not impossible, but not specified time, place, and circumstances. So the green from tender grew brilliant--grew deep--became void of interest to the accustomed eye, and more or less dust settled over it. It was manifest to all that spring was past. Then began an anxious time. Those lectures, those miserable lectures! Those courses, those wretched courses, which he had neglected! That blessed information he had spared to cull when the time was for it! These things seemed likely to get their revenge. When he awoke to a sense of his danger--very late! only when the bloom was off the year, when lily and early rose had gone where they could divert no mortal more--he could not believe that he should not, by fitting exertion, catch up in time at the appointed goal. He worked rabidly, with a wet cloth around his head. He thought not of girls in those days, I promise you; he recked not of bronze-gold hair! It was written that he should not be saved. He closed his school term pitiably conditioned.