in grace and vigor, but she was
seldom seen wooing the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had
acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she
initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing
and hand-in-hand figures in general.

Ian Stewart, too, neglected the orange and went in for hand-in-hand
figures that season. Other things, too, he neglected; work, which he had
never before allowed to suffer measurably from causes within his
control; and far from blushing for his idleness, he rejoiced in it, as
the surest sign of all that for him the Festival of Spring had come in
the time of nature's frost.

It was not only the crisp air, the frequent sun, the joyous flights over
the ringing ice that made his blood run faster through his veins and
laughter come more easily to his lips; that aroused him in the morning
with a strange sense of delight, as though some spirit had awakened him
with a glad reveille at the window of his soul. He, too, was in Arcady.
That in itself should be sufficient joy; he knew he must restrain his
impatience for more. Not till the summer, when the lady of his heart had
ceased to be also his pupil, must he make avowal of his love.

Mildred on her part found Stewart the most attractive of the men with
whom she was acquainted. As yet in this new existence of hers, she had
not moved outside the Oxford circle--a circle exceptional in England,
because in it intellectual eminence, not always recognized, when
recognized receives as much honor as is accorded to a great fortune or
a great name in ordinary society. Stewart's abilities were of a kind to
be recognized by the Academic world. He was already known in the
Universities of the Continent and America. Oxford was proud of him; and
although Mildred had no desire to marry as yet, it gratified her taste
and her vanity to win him for a lover.

CHAPTER VI

Mildred had had no desire to spend her vacations with Lady Thomson, and
on the ground of her reading for the Schools, had been allowed to spend
them in Oxford. Tims, who had no relations, remained with her. She had
for Mildred a sentiment almost like that of a parent, besides an
admiration for which she was slightly ashamed, feeling it to be
something of a slur on the memory of Milly, her first and kindest
friend.

Mildred had recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her
former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work