d not cry: Boy Woodburn was never known to cry. She did not faint.
She very rarely fainted. But she trembled through and through.

Mrs. Woodburn paid the necessary fees. The schoolmistress didn't ask to
have the girl back. She admitted that she could make nothing of her.

"Stuck her toes in," said Old Mat. "And I don't blame her. Can't see Boy
walkin' out two be two, and hand in hand." He shook his head. "Mustn't
put a blood filly in the cart, Mar," he said. "She'll only kick the
caboodlum to pieces."

Mrs. Woodburn made one more effort to educate her daughter on
conventional lines. She introduced a governess to Putnam's. But after
the girl had taken her mistress for a ride, the poor woman came to Mrs.
Woodburn in tears and asked to leave.

"I can't teach her the irregular verbs on horseback," she said. "And she
won't learn any other way. Directly I begin on them, she starts to
gallop."

Mrs. Woodburn accepted the governess's notice, and tried nothing
further.

"She must go her own way now," she said to Mat.

"It's the right way, Mar," replied the old man comfortably.

"I hope so," answered his wife.

"She can read, and she can write, and she can 'rithmetik,'" continued
the other. "What more d'you want with this 'ere education?" He went out,
shaking his head. "I sha'n't wep no tear," he said. "That I sha'n't,
even if she don't get round them wriggle-regular French worms Mamsel
talks of. Roast beef o' old England for me."

Mrs. Woodburn announced her decision to her daughter.

"Thank you, mother," said the girl quietly, and added: "It's no
good--not for me."

Mrs. Woodburn eyed her daughter.

"You're a good maid, Boy," she said. "That's the main."

A month later the girl asked her mother if she might help with the lads'
Bible Class.

Mrs. Woodburn consented.

A year later, when the girl was sixteen, Mrs. Woodburn asked her
daughter if she would take the class alone.

The girl thought it over for a month.

Then she said yes.

In the interval she had passed through a spiritual crisis and made a
great renunciation.

She had resolved to put aside the dream that had dominated her inner
life for seven years.

CHAPTER XI

Brazil Silver

Boy Woodburn's calling had thrown her from early youth into contact with
Eton men.

Indeed, in her experience the world was divided into Eton men--and the
Rest. That was what the girl believed; and it was clearly what the Eton
men believed, too. Boy hers