ce, as much as
to say, "There you are, and nothing could be easier!"

Nothing could be more conventional and more unspeakably correct. Only
when Winny Dymond did it there was a difference, or it seemed so to
young Ransome. Winny approached the bars with shyness and a certain
earnestness and gravity of intent. She hesitated; for a moment she was
adorable in vacillation. She shook her head at the bars, she bit her lip
at them; she set her face at them in defiance; then, with a sudden
amazing celerity she gave a little run forward and leaped upon them; she
swung herself in perfect rhythm and motion onward and upward and from
side to side; she arched her sturdy but exquisitely supple body like a
bridge, flung herself over as if in pure abandonment of joy and lighted
on her feet, curtseying correctly but with something piteous in the
gesture of the outstretched arm, and upon her face an expression of
great surprise and wonder at herself, as if Winny said, not "There you
are!" but "Here I am, and oh, I never thought I should be!"

And from his place by the pillar Ransome gave the little inarticulate
murmur he reserved for Winny. It was charged with his sense of
tenderness and absurdity.

* * * * *

A quarter to ten. His own performances--his wonderful performances on
the horizontal bar--were over; and over the demonstration by F. Booty
with the Indian clubs, where young Fred, slender and supple as a faun,
played on his own muscles in faultless rhythm. And now with an eye upon
the Mayor the order was given for the last item on the programme:

/#
THE COMBINED MAZE
#/

There was a rush of energetic young men who flung themselves upon the
properties of the Gymnasium. They ran them--the parallel bars, the
horses, the mattresses--in under the galleries; they uprooted the posts
of the horizontal bar; they cleared the whole of the vast oblong space
bounded by the pillars.

An attendant then appeared with a bit of chalk in his hand, and with the
chalk he drew upon the floor certain mystic circles, one at each corner
of the oblong, one in the center, the heart of the Maze, and facing it
two smaller circles, one at each side on a visionary line. Seven mystic,
seven sacred circles in all did he draw, and vanished, unconscious of
the sanctity and symbolism of his deed.

For he, with his bit of white chalk, had marked the course for the great
running, for the race that the young men and the