was of
great importance to Connie's after history. It had placed her suddenly
on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and
had transformed her old childish relation to him--which had alone made
the scene possible--into something entirely different. It produced a
singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough what befell
her to dare to say what he had said to her. It had been--she admitted
it--a lesson in scrupulousness, in high delicacy of feeling, in
magnanimity. "You are trifling with what may be the life of
another--just to amuse yourself--or to pay off a moment's offence. Only
the stupid or cruel souls do such things--or think lightly of them. But
not you--your mother's daughter!"

That had been the meaning of his sudden incursion. The more Connie
thought of it, the more it thrilled her. It was both her charm and her
weakness, at this moment, that she was so plastic, so responsive both
for good and evil. She said to herself that she was fortunate to have
such a friend; and she was conscious of a new and eager wish to win his
praise, or to avoid his blame.

At the same time it did not occur to her to tell him anything of her
escapade with Douglas Falloden. But the more closely she kept this to
herself, the more eager she was to appease her conscience and satisfy
Sorell, in the matter of Alice and Herbert Pryce. Her instinct showed
her what to do, and Sorell watched her struggling with the results of
her evening's flirtation with much secret amusement and applause.
Herbert Pryce having been whistled on, had to be whistled off, and Alice
had to be gently and gradually reassured; yet without any obvious
penitence on Connie's part, which would only have inflicted additional
wounds on Alice's sore spirit.

And Connie did it, broadly speaking, during the week of Falloden's
schools. Sorell himself was busy every day and all day as one of the
Greats examiners. He scarcely saw her for more than two half-hours
during a hideously strenuous week, through which he sat immersed in the
logic and philosophy papers of the disappearing generation of Honour
men. Among the papers of the twenty or thirty men who were the certain
Firsts of the year, he could not help paying a special attention to
Douglas Falloden's. What a hard and glittering mind the fellow
had!--extraordinarily competent and well-trained; extraordinarily
lacking, as it seemed to Sorell, in width or pliancy, or humanity. One
of