doubtedly
handsome, and he had, moreover, power. When he had finished his
prayer, and had begun his short address to the scholars, she glanced
at him again, and saw what splendid shoulders he had, how proudly he
held his head, and yet what a boyish ingenuousness went with it all.
Maria did not look at Evelyn at all. Had she done so, she would have
been startled. Evelyn was gazing at the new principal with the utmost
unreserve, the unreserve of awakened passion which does not know
itself because of innocence and ignorance. Evelyn, gazing at the
young man, had never been so unconscious of herself, and at the same
time she had never been so conscious. She felt a life to which she
had been hitherto a stranger tingling through every vein and nerve of
her young body, through every emotion of her young soul. She gazed
with wide-open eyes like a child, the rose flush deepened on her
cheeks, her parted lips became moist and deep crimson, pulses
throbbed in her throat. She smiled involuntarily, a smile of purest
delight and admiration. Love twofold had awakened within her
emotional nature. Love of herself, as she might be seen in another's
eyes, and love of another. And yet she did not know it was love, and
she felt no shame, and no fright, nothing but rapture. She was in the
broad light of the present, under the direct rays of a firmament of
life and love. Another girl, Addie Hemingway, who was no older than
Evelyn, but shrewd beyond her years, with a taint of coarseness,
noticed her, and nudged the girl at her right. "Just look at Evelyn
Edgham," she whispered.

The other girl looked.

"I suppose she thinks she'll catch him, she's so awful pretty,"
whispered Addie maliciously.

"I don't think she is so very pretty," whispered back the other girl,
who was pretty herself and disposed to assert her own claims to
attention.

"She thinks she is," whispered back Addie. "Just see how bold she
looks at him. I should think she would be ashamed of herself."

"So should I," nodded the other girl.

But Evelyn had no more conception of the propriety of shame than
nature itself. She was pure nature. Presently Wollaston himself, who
had been making his address to his pupils with a vague sense of an
upturned expanse of fresh young faces of boys and girls, without any
especial face arresting his attention, saw Evelyn with a start which
nobody, man or woman, could have helped. She was so beautiful that
she could no more be passed unnoti