p his horses viciously at the
station rack. This, too, hurt her; she exclaimed faintly at the brutally
drawn bits. A man hurried forward to take her bag, and then, in a
blowing of horn, a harsh exhaust of steam, she was gone. A last, hurried
impression of her delicate profile on a small pane of glass accompanied
him back to Myrtle Forge. There his mother regarded him with an open
concern. "Something's on your mind," she declared. "I passed your door
at midnight, and there was light under it. I've often told you about
sitting up late."

"I'm getting along," he replied lightly. "You fail to do justice to the
weight of my increasing majority. But, in a little, you'll be astonished
at my renewed youth." He became serious in speaking, conscious of the
new life Susan would, must, bring into his existence.

XVIII

Since he had declared himself so decidedly and at once, no hesitation
was possible; he must, he was aware, move remorselessly forward in
assault. To sweep Susan Brundon into his desire, overwhelm her
defences--he called them prejudices but immediately after withdrew that
term--offered the greatest, the only promise of success. An obliterating
snow fell for the following thirty hours, and a week went by in the
readjustment to ordinary conditions of living and travel. But at the end
of that period Jasper Penny left Myrtle Forge for the city, with a
determined, an almost confident, mouth, and a bright, hard gaze. Late
afternoon, he decided, would be the best time for his appearance at the
Academy. And the western sky was a luminous, bright red when he passed
under the stripped, uneasy branches of the willow trees to the school
door.

Miss Brundon's office, rigorous as the corridor of a hospital, had a
table and uncompromising wooden chairs on a rectangle of bluish-pink
carpet; a glowing, round stove held a place on a square of gleaming,
embossed zinc, while the remaining surfaces were scrubbed oak flooring
and white calcimine. A large geographer's globe, a sphere of pale,
glazed yellow traced in violet and thin vermilion and cobalt, rested on
an involuted mahogany stand; and a pile of text books covered in gay
muslin made a single, decisive note of colour.

She kept him waiting, he felt uneasily, a long while; perhaps she had a
class; but he felt that that was not the reason for her delay. When she
finally appeared in soft brown merino, with a deep fichu of old, dark
lace, and black ribbons, she courageous