lways were--always will be. They were intended 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