_ you heard Leonie play the Moonlight?"

"No! What's it like?"

"Simply _awful_, just like Mam'zel when she thumps downstairs in her
felt slippers."

There fell a space of drowsy silence in which the girls lay back on the
grass incline, and solemnly munched chocolates with youth's delightful
dissociation from anything more perplexing than the passing of the
actual hour.

"No!" murmured Annie Smith, breaking the drowsy spell. "She's _not_
like us--couldn't be with a V.C. father and India as a birthright. But
isn't it all _wonderfully_ mysterious?"

Dear unsophisticated soul, whose _wanderlust_ was yearly arrested, or
rather satisfied, with the summer holiday by the sea, and whose rector
father acted as a weekly soporific to his congregation.

"I wonder who gave her that perfectly _horrible_ charm?" she added
sleepily.

"The ayah, I _think_," came an equally sleepy answer. "Did I tell you
that I found it in the bath-room the other night? It's an eye--a
cat's-eye, you know--a perfect beast of a thing; I would swear it
winked at me when I dropped it on the floor. Anyway I left it there
and simply _flew_ out of the room to tell Leonie, and Jessica pinched,
I beg Principal's pardon, took my bath. Ugh! and she wears it night
and day--oh! look, here she comes----"

"Oh!" sighed plain Annie Smith, "isn't she _beautiful_!"

She was!

Unaware that anyone was watching, Leonie stopped in front of a bush of
red roses. She neither touched or sniffed them; she just flung out her
arms, lifted her face to the blazing sun and laughed.

The simple school frock showed the wonder of her figure, with the
beautiful rounded bust, the slender waist, and the moulded limbs; the
sun drew red and yellow lights out of the heavy russet hair, gold
flecks out of the green eyes, and a flash of crimson from the rather
full clear-cut mouth with its turned-up corners.

Her skin was like ivory with the faintest tinge of pink just on the
very tip of the rather pronounced cheek-bones; her hands were small and
fine, and the fingers were like pea-pods, long and slender and slightly
dimpled.

And when she moved away towards the summer-house where she could see
the sea, she moved not at all from her waist upwards. She held her
head and shoulders as though she had carried baskets of fruit or
washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom
was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a
deer, or