blab about Hilaria
having been here I'll baste you."

They promised eagerly, and Hilaria thanked him in a subdued voice. She
went through the darkness to where she had left her crinoline. They
found it lying, wet with dew, a prostrate system of ugly rings, held
together by webbing. It looked incredibly naked, a hollow mockery of the
portentous dome it had stood for in the eyes of the world.

He slung it over one shoulder without a word, inwardly resenting
bitterly the touch of the ludicrous it gave to the evening's happenings,
and almost silently he went with the stumbling girl towards the town,
only leaving her at the corner of her lane. She thanked him with a new
shyness, and taking the cumbrous emblem of her inferiority over her left
arm, held out her strong hard little right hand to him.

"Don't think it horrid of me to have stayed," she pleaded. "It was that
I so wanted you to win ... I was afraid ..."

"It was very--very unladylike," began Ishmael, then paused. Till that
moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had
become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his
womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him
adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it
brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause no more.

"Don't worry, Ishmael," she said. "Father has often told me of people
hurting their backs wrestling and doing things like that, and he says
it's very seldom anything. If it is they can't walk at all, and he
walked quite well. Besides, I know he's pretending it's worse than it is
to upset you; he's that sort...."

Ishmael felt a little pang of gratitude, he gripped her hand, muttered a
"good-night," and was off through the darkness. But he did not go back
to the school for an hour yet. He was in for such trouble an hour more
or less after time made no difference, and he was past thinking in terms
of the clock. He had grown up violently and painfully in a short space,
and ordinary methods of measuring time mean very little to one who has
crowded years of growth into one evening. He walked about the moor till
physical exhaustion drove him in, where Old Tring, with a glance at him,
gave him hot brandy and water and sent him to bed with hardly a word.
Not till next day did Ishmael notice he was lame in one knee.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WIND UPON THE GRASS-FIELD

A week after the fight Ishmael went