even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls,
whom she had tried so hard unobtrusively to train up towards a
rational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to
write a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted
Miss Smith-Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh; for Miss
Smith-Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one
narrow chink, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been really
fond and proud of Herminia. She had rather shown her off, indeed, as
a social trump card to the hesitating parent,--"This is our second
mistress, Miss Barton; you know her father, perhaps; such an
excellent man, the Dean of Dunwich." And now, Herminia sat down with
a heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowal
she had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast,
and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith-Waters could be of ever
appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her,
Iphigenia-like, to her self-imposed sacrifice.

But, for all that, she wrote her letter through, delicately,
sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told Miss
Smith-Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith-Waters
should know; but she said it with such daintiness that even that
conventionalized and hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling and
recognizing the purity and nobility of her misguided action. Poor
child, Miss Smith-Waters thought; she was mistaken, of course, sadly
and grievously mistaken; but, then, 'twas her heart that misled her,
no doubt; and Miss Smith-Waters, having dim recollections of a
far-away time when she herself too possessed some rudimentary
fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the
poor girl's letter with sympathetic shame, and remorse, and
vexation. Miss Smith-Waters could hardly be expected to understand
that if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degree
wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, she
could never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hers
to hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to principle was not
less but far greater than Miss Smith-Waters's own; only, as it
happened, the principles themselves were diametrically opposite.

Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss
Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life
morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest
conv