The _classes_ formed another building; the hall parted them from the dwelling-house. Despite distance and partition, I heard the sudden stir of numbers, a whole division rising at once. 'They are putting away work,' said madame. It was indeed the hour to put away work, but why that sudden hush, that instant quell of the tumult? 'Wait, madam; I will see what it is.' And I put down my pen and left her. Left her? No. She would not be left. Powerless to detain me, she rose and followed, close as my shadow. I turned on the last step of the stair. 'Are you coming too?' I asked. 'Yes,' she said, meeting my glance with a peculiar aspect--a look clouded, yet resolute. We proceeded then, not together, but she walked in my steps. He was come. Entering the first _classe_, I saw him. There once more appeared the form most familiar. I doubt not they had tried to keep him away, but he was come. The girls stood in a semicircle; he was passing round, giving his farewells, pressing each hand, touching with his lips each cheek. This last ceremony foreign custom permitted at such a parting--so solemn, to last so long. I felt it hard that Madame Beck should dog me thus, following and watching me close. My neck and shoulder shrank in fever under her breath; I became terribly goaded. He was approaching; the semicircle was almost travelled round; he came to the last pupil; he turned. But Madame was before me; she had stepped out suddenly; she seemed to magnify her proportions and amplify her drapery; she eclipsed me; I was hid. She knew my weakness and deficiency; she could calculate the degree of moral paralysis, the total default of self-assertion, with which, in a crisis, I could be struck. She hastened to her kinsman, she broke upon him volubly, she mastered his attention, she hurried him to the door--the glass door opening on the garden. I think he looked round. Could I but have caught his eye, courage, I think, would have rushed in to aid feeling, and there would have been a charge, and, perhaps, a rescue; but already the room was all confusion, the semicircle broken into groups, my figure was lost among thirty more conspicuous. Madame had her will. Yes, she got him away, and he had not seen me. He thought me absent. Five o'clock struck, the loud dismissal bell rang, the school separated, the room emptied. There seems, to my memory, an entire darkness and distraction in some certain minutes I then passed alone--a grief inexpressible over a loss unendurable. _What_ should I do--oh! _what_ should I do--when all my life's hope was thus torn by the roots out of my riven, outraged heart?