"Why shouldn't she want to marry you?" interjected Clare, but that was one of the remarks of which he took little notice. He went on eagerly: "I don't know what the Head will think when he gets to know about it. Most probably he'll be fearfully annoyed. Clanwell warned me the other night. Apparently--" a faint touch of bitterness came into his voice--"apparently it isn't the thing to treat your Headmaster's daughter with anything but the most distant reserve." "Another question," said Clare shrewdly, "is what your people will think about it." "My people," he replied, again with the note of bitterness in his voice, "will probably do what they have always done whenever I have proposed taking any fresh step in life." "I can guess what that is. They oppose you, eh?" "Oh, not absolutely that. They recognise my right to do what I want, but they think I'm a fool, all the same. They don't quarrel with me. They just go on wishing I was like my elder brother." "What is he?" "He works in my father's office in town. My father, you know--" he became suddenly confidential in tone--"is a rather typical sort of business-man. Materialist outlook--wanted me to manage a soap-works. We never got on absolutely well together. When I told him I was going to get a mastership at a public school he thought I was mad." "And what will he think when you tell him you are going to marry the Headmaster's daughter?" He looked at her curiously, for the first time intent upon her personally, for something in the way she had uttered that last question set up in him the suspicion that she was laughing at him. A careful scrutiny of her features, however, revealed no confirmation: he looked away again, shrugged his shoulders, and said: "Probably he'll think I'm madder than ever." She gave him a curious glance with uptilted lips which he could not properly interpret. "Anyway," she said, quietly, "I shouldn't tell him that Helen's a child." "Why not?" Clare gave him again that curious, uninterpretable glance. "Because she isn't, that's all." He was recovering from his surprise and was about to say something when she interrupted him with, perhaps, the first touch of animation that had so far distinguished her side of the conversation. "I told you," she said, "on the first night of term that you didn't understand Helen. And still you don't. If you did, you'd know that she was a woman, not a child at all." "I wish you'd explain a little--" "It doesn't need any explanation. You either know it or don't know it. Apparently you _don't_ know it.... And now, Mr. Speed, I'm afraid I'll have to go--I can't leave the boy to manage the shop by himself all morning." Speed had the sensation that she was slightly out of patience with him. II