Peter was not happy at the High School. It is disconcerting, when you have been First Boy and a Captain, to be put among inferior creatures to learn Greek. Peter had risen with his former friends from the lowest to the highest; they had grown together in sport and learning. Now he found himself in a middle form, an interloper among cliques already established. Moreover, the boys at the High School, where education for such as could not obtain a foundation scholarship was more expensive than at the lower branches, were of a superior quality, with nicer manners and a more delicate way of speaking. He was a stranger.

At sixteen Peter was almost a man. His father had always met him upon an intellectual equality. They had talked upon the gravest matters. Peter had voraciously read a thousand books which he did not altogether understand. It needed only physical adolescence to show him how far he had outstripped the friends of his age.

The lot of a precocious boy is not a happy one, and Peter paid the penalty. He made not a single friend during his two years at the new school. He lived gravely after his own devices, quiet, observant, superficially accessible to the kind [Pg 40]advances of his masters and classfellows, but profoundly unaffected.

Nevertheless these years were the most important of Peter\'s life, wherein he learned all that his father was able to teach him. Peter, years after he had outlived much of his early wisdom, yet looked back upon this time as peculiarly sacred to his father. From him he learned to accept naturally the perplexing instincts that now were arisen within him. Peter escaped the usual unhappy period of surmise and shamefast perplexity.

More particularly these were the glorious years of Peter and Miranda. Peter found in Miranda the perfect maid, and Miranda, eager for knowledge and greedy of adoration, reaching after the life of a woman with the mind and body of a girl, found in Peter the pivot of the world. In these years were laid the foundations of an incredible intimacy. Daily they grew in a perpetual discovery of themselves. Peter opened to Miranda the store of his knowledge. There was perfect confidence. At an age when the secrets of life are the subject of uneasy curiosity at best, and at worst of thoughtless defamation, Peter and Miranda talked of them as they talked of their bees (Peter\'s latest craze); of the stars; of the poets they loved (Miranda was not yet altogether a woman: she loved the poets); of the life they would lead in the friendly world.

Miranda was the more thrown upon Peter as[Pg 41] neither of her parents was able to direct her. Her mother was entirely unimaginative. Her fierce affection for Miranda showed itself in a continual insistence that she should "behave"; read and eat only what was good for her; and be as well, if not better, dressed than the children of her neighbours. For her father Miranda had some affection, but she could not respect him. She saw him continually overridden by her mother, and already she overtopped him in stature by a head.

The months went quickly by, and soon it was the eve of Peter\'s journey to Oxford as the candidate for an open scholarship. Peter was nervously excited. Every little detail, in his heightened sensibility, seemed important. It was late summer, a warm night, the room filling rapidly with shadows. Miranda sat by the window, her face to the fallen sun.

The men were talking politics. Their lifted voices grated upon Peter\'s thoughts. It was a time of strikes and rioting. Mr. Paragon, as an orator, was urgently requested in the streets of Hamingburgh. He was full of his theme, and extremely angry with Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith was an entirely amiable little man, but he delighted in the phrases of battle. He talked politics in a soldier\'s terms. He was perpetually storming the enemy\'s position or turning his rear. The English political situation was in Mr. Smith\'s view never far removed from war and revolution. He delighted in images of violence. The mildest of[Pg 42] small men, whose nerves were shattered by an unexpected noise, he was always ready to talk of the prime duty of governments to stamp out rebellion in blood. Mr. Smith could not pull a cracker at Christmas without shutting his eyes and getting as far as possible from the explosion; but, politically, he was a Prussian.

"Shoot them down!"

Mr. Smith was repeating a formula by now almost mechanical.

To Peter it was desperately familiar. The men\'s voices every now and then were overborne by Mrs. Smith in one of her perpetual recommendations to Miranda.

"Take your elbows off the sill, Miranda."

"Yes, mother."

Miranda answered with the mechanical obedience of a child who makes allowances.

She turned at the same time into the room, full of the contrast between the beauty of the garden and the two absurd figures in dispute upon the hearthrug. She looked over to Peter in the shadow.

His eyes were full of her, burning with delight.

Miranda, meeting his look, felt suddenly too glad for endurance. She burst from her seat.

Her mother\'s voice, thin and penetrating, was plainly heard above the ground-bass of political argument.

"Where are you going, Miranda?"

"Into the garden, mother," patiently answered[Pg 43] Miranda, and with never a look at Peter she went.

The men talked on. Peter quietly followed Miranda into the garden, unnoticed except by his mother.

Mrs. Paragon had read the lines of her son\'s face. She sighed as he slipped away, knowing that at that moment the world held for Peter but one thing really precious. She smiled, not bitterly, but with indulgence, upon the talking fathers.

Peter and Miranda sat for many minutes without a word. The evening was perfect, the shining of stars in a violet sky mocked on earth with the shining of great clusters of evening primrose. How full the night seemed! The stars were very secret, but the secret waited to be told.

"I shall not be able to bear it," said Miranda suddenly.

"Four days," said Peter.

"But after that."

"Eight weeks at a time."

But Miranda\'s heart sank at the eternity of eight weeks.

Protesting with her, Peter at last said:

"I\'m always with you, Miranda."

She turned and found he was looking where Mirza glittered with its companion star. He had written her a poem in which he had likened Mirza to himself, eternally passing through heaven with his tiny friend.

Miranda felt to-night how empty was this fancy.

[Pg 44]

"You are going away," she said, "and you have never——" She stopped, frightened and ashamed. She wished to run from the place, and she was glad of the dark.

The feeling passed, and she lifted her head, looking at Peter. Her eyes were full of challenge and of fear, of confession, of reserve—the courage of a maid—proud to be as yet untouched, but happy in surrender.

"All that I have—and how beautiful it is!—is yours," was what Peter read.

The tears rushed into her eyes. They both were crying as Peter kissed her. It was the first kiss of lovers two years old, the first delicate breach of their chastity.

Miranda lifted her head upon Peter\'s arm.

"I want to be with you always," she said. "I cannot bear you to go away."

Footsteps intruded. Uncle Henry had come, God-speeding his nephew. Peter had been missed, and Uncle Henry was coming to find him. Peter felt as if the world were advancing to rob him of something too precious to be lawfully his. He wanted to save Miranda from this intrusion.

"Good-bye, darling!" he whispered.

She understood.

"Hold me near to you, Peter," she said. They kissed a second time, lingering on the peril of discovery. She ran lightly away as Uncle Henry parted the bushes and thrust his great head towards the seat.

[Pg 45]

"Hullo, Peter, my boy, is that you?"

"Yes, Uncle."

"I thought I would look round to wish you luck."

"Thank you, Uncle."

"Somebody did not want to see me," said Uncle Henry, crossly following Miranda with his eyes.

Peter flashed an indignant look upon his uncle. He could not tell him why Miranda had gone away; how she was too precious to suffer the contact of dull earth.

They walked into the house. For Peter the rest of the evening passed in a dream. He made his plans for an early breakfast, received the last advice as to his trains and the disposition of his money, and went as soon as possible to his bedroom under the eaves.