ountry people called her "goings-on" than if he had lived
in an alien clime.

Hilaria was a hoyden. She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil,
sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing
trees. She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the
most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad
way. That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet
some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the
wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer Eve was proof of all these things,
and yet what a scandal it made in St. Renny when the fact leaked out!...

Hilaria was at present going through a phase of "trying to be good," as
the bishop was coming to hold a confirmation, and only those accounted
worthy were to be confirmed. Her goodness was of that healthy elastic
kind natural to children, which never prevents them doing what they
wish, because they instinctively keep it in a compartment to itself.
There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys
who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of
honour to be "done" together. Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as
she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and
the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness
of her age in it. She was nearly sixteen, several months younger than
Ishmael, who was now just over that age, and who, owing to the
reputation for seriousness his secretiveness had earned for him, was one
of the candidates undergoing preparation with Old Tring. He had
apparently outgrown his fits of unbalanced talkativeness, and had
become, with the difficult years, one of those boys who speak with
almost comical rarity, and then with unemotional gruffness. This power
of reticence never fails to win respect, if of a half-irritated,
half-resentful order, and Ishmael held a certain position in the school.
Also as the ward of a parson he was supposed to "be good" and know about
such things as confirmations. As a matter of fact, he considered his own
Tractarian principles, rigidly inculcated by Boase, as superior to the
mild evangelical platitudes of Old Tring, and plumed himself
accordingly. He was just at that dangerous age, reached somewhat later
in the healthy normalities of school than it would have been had he
stayed eating his own thoughts at Cloom, when religion either falls away
en