e turned
her shoulder on him and sat thus averted, gazing at her own hands folded
in her lap.

Ransome leaned out over the balustrade and watched Winny. And for a
moment, as he watched her, he felt again the old sense of tenderness and
absurdity, mingled, this time, with that mysterious pain.

A barbell struck on the floor. A feminine voice gave the sharp word of
command, and the Young Ladies formed up for their performance on the
parallel bars.

Miss Usher still sat averted.

"Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn."

She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked.

Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was going through her little
preliminary byplay at the bars. Then, with her startling suddenness, she
rushed at them, and swung herself, it seemed to Ransome, with an
increased abandonment, a wilder rhythm and motion; and when she raised
her body like an arch, far-stretching and wide-planted, it seemed to him
that it rose higher and stretched farther and wider than before, that
there was, in fact, something preposterous in her attitude. For as Miss
Usher looked at Winny she drew herself up and her red mouth stiffened.

Ranny's tension relaxed when Winny flung herself from side to side again
and over, and lighted on her feet in the little curtseying posture,
perfunctory and pathetic.

He clapped his hands. "'Jove! That's good!" He was smiling tenderly.

He turned to Miss Usher, eager and delighted. "Well--what'd you think of
it?"

The eyes he gazed into were remote and cold. Miss Usher did not answer
him. And he gathered from her silence that she disapproved profoundly of
the performance. He wondered why.

"Oh, come," he said. "She's the best we've got. There's not one of those
girls that can touch her on the bars. Look at them."

"I don't want to look at them. I didn't think it would be like that. I'm
not used to it. I've never been to a Gymnasium in my life before."

"You ought to come. You should join us, Miss Usher. Why don't you?"

"Thank you, Mr. Ransome, I'd rather not. I don't see myself!"

He didn't see her either. Some of his innocence had gone. She had taken
it away from him. He was beginning to understand how Winny's performance
had struck her. It was magnificent, but it was not a thing that could be
done by a nice woman, by a woman who respected herself and her own
womanhood and her own beauty; not a thing that could be done by Violet
Usher. He was not sure that in her view it w