should wish to lean upon her, she may triumph in the fact without understanding it, and give chaff instead of consolation.  Agatha wanted to be understood and not to be chaffed.  Finding herself unable to satisfy both these conditions, she resolved to do without sympathy and to hold her tongue.  She had often had to do so before, and she was helped on this occasion by a sense of the ridiculous appearance her passion might wear in the vulgar eye.  Her secret kept itself, as she was supposed in the college to be insensible to the softer emotions.  Love wrought no external change upon her.  It made her believe that she had left her girlhood behind her and was now a woman with a newly-developed heart capacity at which she would childishly have scoffed a little while before.  She felt ashamed of the bee on the window pane, although it somehow buzzed as frequently as before in spite of her.  Her calendar, formerly a monotonous cycle of class times, meal times, play times, and bed time, was now irregularly divided by walks past the chalet and accidental glimpses of its tenant.

Early in December came a black frost, and navigation on the canal was suspended.  Wickens’s boy was sent to the college with news that Wickens’s pond would bear, and that the young ladies should be welcome at any time.  The pond was only four feet deep, and as Miss Wilson set much store by the physical education of her pupils, leave was given for skating.  Agatha, who was expert on the ice, immediately proposed that a select party should go out before breakfast next morning.  Actions not in themselves virtuous often appear so when performed at hours that compel early rising, and some of the candidates for the Cambridge Local, who would not have sacrificed the afternoon to amusement, at once fell in with her suggestion.  But for them it might never have been carried out; for when they summoned Agatha, at half-past six next morning, to leave her warm bed and brave the biting air, she would have refused without hesitation had she not been shamed into compliance by these laborious ones who stood by her bedside, blue-nosed and hungry, but ready for the ice.  When she had dressed herself with much shuddering and chattering, they allayed their internal discomfort by a slender meal of biscuits, got their skates, and went out across the rimy meadows, past patient cows breathing clouds of steam, to Wickens’s pond.  Here, to their surprise, was Smilash, on electro-plated acme skates, practicing complicated figures with intense diligence.  It soon appeared that his skill came short of his ambition; for, after several narrow escapes and some frantic staggering, his calves, elbows, and occiput smote the ice almost simultaneously.  On rising ruefully to a sitting posture he became aware that eight young ladies were watching his proceedings with interest.

“This comes of a common man putting himself above his station by getting into gentlemen’s skates,” he said.  “Had I been content with a humble slide, as my fathers was, I should ha’ been a happier man at the present moment.”  He sighed, rose, touched his hat to Miss Ward, and took off his skates, adding:  “Good-morning, Miss.  Miss Wilson sent me word to be here sharp at six to put on the young ladies’ skates, and I took the liberty of trying a figure or two to keep out the cold.”