eathing big
lungs. Mr. Cuper, too, had spoken well of them.

'You walked the twenty miles?' Aminta interrupted him.

'With my German friend: out and home: plenty of time in the day. He
has taken to English boys, but asks why enthusiasm and worship of great
deeds don't grow upward from them to their elders. And I, in turn, ask
why Germans insist on that point more even than the French do.'

'Germans are sentimental. But the English boys he saw belonged to
a school with traditions of enthusiasm sown by some one. The school
remembered?'

'Curiously, Mr. Cuper tells me, the hero of the school has dropped
and sprung up, stout as ever, twice--it tells me what I wish to
believe--since Lord Ormont led their young heads to glory. He can't say
how it comes. The tradition's there, and it 's kindled by some flying
spark.'

'They remember who taught the school to think of Lord Ormont?'

'I 'm a minor personage. I certainly did some good, and that 's a push
forward.'

'They speak of you?'

It was Aminta more than the Countess of Ormont speaking to him.

'You take an interest in the boys,' he said, glowing. 'Yes, well, they
have their talks. I happened to be a cricketer, counting wickets and
scores. I don't fancy it's remembered that it was I preached my lord. A
day of nine wickets and one catch doesn't die out of a school. The
boy Gowen was the prime spirit in getting up the subscription for the
laundress. But Bench and Parsons are good boys, too.'

He described them, dwelt on them. The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is
perilously near to boring. Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence's absence.
She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself
to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and
she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of
a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero
dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly--a kind of distant
cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying
spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent. Moreover, the dear
boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for
the moth-box. She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the
school-laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the
child, little Jane, aged six. Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water
to which little Jane had given celebrity over the county. The girl stood
up