went a ball. Cracks at the
ball anyhow, was the game for the twenty-five minutes breather before
dinner.

'French day!' said Calliani, hearing their cries. Then he bellowed
'Matthew!--Giulio!'

A lusty inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel
returned his hail. The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry in the
distance. Here were lungs! Here were sprites!

Lord Ormont bethought him of the name of the master. 'Mr. Matthew, I
think you said, sir,' he was observing to Calliani, as the master came
nearer; and Calliani replied: 'His Christian name. But if the boys are
naughty boys, it is not the privilege. Mr. Weyburn.'

There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on
the rush to his friend.

Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting. Neither of
them flinched in eye or limb.

At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood. Her colour was
the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought: 'It has come!'
Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.

The two men conversed. There was no gesture.

This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the
meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may
still be; her soul being with one. And that one, dearer than the blood
of her body, imperilled by her.

She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp. She
would ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her
desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of
doom. An incessant clamour dinned about her: 'It has come!'

The two men walked conversing into the school-house. She was unconscious
of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her
mind believed she knew a friend in him. The two disappeared. She was
insensible stone, except for the bell-clang: 'It has come'; until they
were in view again, still conversing: and the first of her thought to
stir from petrifaction was: 'Life holds no secret.'

She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to
force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of
geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive
of the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was
a triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from view
again, still conversing.

They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate. He of the grey head
poi