nded to be, if we are to call
them bad. Botched mendings will only make them worse.'

'Which side suffers?'

'Both; and both like it. One side must be beaten at any game. It's off
and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
boots. Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school? Funny mothers!'

'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition. 'The mothers
would not leave their girls unless they were confident . . . ?'

'There's to be a female head of the female department? He reckons on
finding a woman as big a fool as himself? A fair bit of reckoning enough.
He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now and then
I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'

The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.

He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
coming. They were introspective and beamless. She had an odd leaning to
the talk upon Cuper's boys. He was puzzled by what he might have classed,
in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to incidents
which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost their
glow for her.

A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed to
J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and
signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under
strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of
the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to Miss
Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the girls had
taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though the
contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was. And then the girls
heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited to proclaim
himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had jumped on his
legs and into the name of--one who was previously thought by Miss
Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,' as Mr.
Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian
school-fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the
land and shed Christian blood. Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon
from his desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike,
vilifying the infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'

'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
Weyburn said--

'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident