lo's, and she
pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
confession to herself of her unrepented regrets. She and Matey Weyburn
had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch. They were,
then, unplighted if now the grave divided them! No touch: mere glances!
And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
it would have been. If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn. A sigh like
the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
seeing his look as she said it!

The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done. Agreeing with
the remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could do
to be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?

There was no reply to the question. But it became a nestling centre for
the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
capacities, tending to the depreciatory. She could do little. She
entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,'
as her favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and
serving--proving that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont,
ranged with all the other countesses in china and Dresden on a
drawing-room mantelpiece for show. She could organize, manage a
household, manage people too, she thought: manage a husband? The word
offends. Perhaps invigorate him, here and there perhaps inspire him,
if he would let her breathe. Husbands exist who refuse the right of
breathing to their puppet wives. Above all, as it struck her, she could
assist, and be more than an echo of one nobler, in breathing manliness,
high spirit, into boys. With that idea she grazed the shallows of
reality, and her dreams whirred from the nest and left it hungrily
empty.

Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease. Aminta noted it as
a mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
observing the simple. It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted
and indefensible. She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident