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Of course, the new light flooded the school gossip immediately. But there never came any more; every new girl was free to work her own will on Miss Wing’s romance. Was “Max” dead? Had they parted because of any act on the woman’s part? Surely he could not have been false, to receive that daily oblation of flowers. It was more likely that she thus expressed an imperishable regret. Youth, ever fanciful, played with all manner of dainty and plaintive variations on the theme. Its very mystery was its poignant charm; since each tender young soul created a new romance and a new appeal. Elusive and pathetic, it hovered on the edge of these young lives, like the perfume of a flower. And its influence was the more potent that it asked for nothing. It is not too much to say that the spectacle of that gentle and reticent faithfulness was the strongest element in the school atmosphere. Certainly, because of it, Miss Wing had greater power over her scholars. She was a woman of ability and gentle force; by nature a little aloof, a little precise, able to feel deeply, but not able to express her sympathies or her pain. Without her mysterious sorrow, she would have seemed to young girls a thought too admirable; they would have been chilled by her virtues; but as it was, their perception that she had lived deeply, that she had suffered, that she had been loved and had loved eternally, opened their hearts. They would have admired her, now they adored her. By degrees, and insensibly to herself, she became the confessor of her little world. After they left school, her girls brought her their perplexities of the heart. Wives came to her with cruel dilemmas which they shrank from revealing to their own mothers–perhaps because the mothers could not be trusted to plead for the erring husband so well; for a woman who loves complains, not to be justified herself, but to hear her lover’s misconduct excused and his love proved against her doubts. Before they left school, the girls confessed their faults and failings and strivings of conscience with the same eagerness with which they asked counsel in their innocent romances of friendship or the sorrows of trigonometry, and they accepted any penance directed, not only with patience, but a kind of exaltation natural to youth, which finds a secret joy in the exercise of its own fortitude.

To-day, however, Miss Wing sat before the picture which so many young eyes had studied with such vague, yet ardent, sympathy, and pondered over a confidence that had not come. The lack of its coming hurt her; and the tap on her door was welcome, for she thought, “It is she–coming to tell me. Oh, I hope he is the right man.”

At her response, the door swung open with a jerk, and the dark-eyed girl who entered was catching her breath, although she tried to make the quick intakes noiseless. There was a look of pale resolution on her features.

“Have you come to let me congratulate you, my dear?” said the principal, rising. The girl colored scarlet. “I’ve come because I had to, because I couldn’t deceive you,” she blurted. “Miss Wing, it isn’t so. I let Miss Parker think so; but I’m not engaged to him.”

“Sit down, dear,” said Miss Wing. The soft cadence of her voice did not roughen. She sat down when her guest sat, and leaned back in her desk chair, folding her slim, white hands. There were flashing rings on her hands; and the girls used to wonder which ring “Max” had given her. They favored the sapphire, set between two diamonds, because of its beauty (“a real Cashmere, you know”), and because, whether she wore other rings or not, this always kept its place.

“Now, tell me,” said Miss Wing.

“I had a letter from him this morning; it was just a note in one of Helen Grier’s”–the girl’s lithe form was erect in the chair, every muscle tense; she looked past Miss Wing to the wall and spoke in toneless voice; no one could see that she was driving straight on to her purpose, over her own writhing nerves–“all he said was that he had been called back to Germany–“