what
you are taught, sir, and not try to think, it would be a great deal
pleasanter for the rest of us."

Mr. Simpson would get a little red under the onslaught, but his eyes
always retained their patient, perplexed expression. He seemed
impervious to the impression he created in the back row. "Laughing-stock
of the whole class," Mr. Phillips called him in a moment of extreme
irritation, and the expression caught on.

"I am so silly," he said to Joan. "I really am not surprised that they
think me funny."

She was the one person who was ever nice to him or who did attempt to
explain things to him. Sometimes they would get there a little early and
she would go over his exercises with him. He might be thick-skinned to
the want of tolerance which the rest of the class meted out to him; he
was undoubtedly grateful to Joan for the kindness she showed him.

One evening on his way to class he plucked up courage to purchase a
small buttonhole for her, and blushed a very warm red when Joan took his
offering with a smile and pinned it into her coat.

"How nice of you," she said. "I love violets, and these smell so sweet."

"They are not half sweet enough for you," he managed to say, stuttering
furiously.

Joan had a moment's uneasiness. Surely the wretched little man was not
going to fall in love with her? She glanced sideways at him during the
class and what she saw reassured her. His clothes, his dirty hands, his
whole appearance, put him in a different world to herself. However kind
she might be to him, he surely could not fail to recognize that it was
only the same kindness which would prompt her to cross the road to give
a penny to a beggar?

Unfortunately Mr. Simpson belonged to a class which is very slow to
recognize any difference in rank save that of wealth. He was a humble
little man before Joan, but that was because he was by nature humble,
and also because he was in love. He thought her very wonderful and
beautiful beyond his range of words, but he imagined her as coming from
much the same kind of home as his own, and she seemed to exist in the
same strata of life.

A night or two after the flower episode he fixed adoring eyes on her and
asked if he might be allowed to see her home.

"Well, it is rather out of your way," Joan remonstrated, she had so
often seen him trudge off in the opposite direction.

"That is of no consequence," he replied, with his usual stutter.

The streets were dark, quiet, and de