'There's to be a female head of the female department? He reckons on finding a woman as big a fool as himself? A fair bit of reckoning enough. He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now and then I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'
The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.
He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next coming. They were introspective and beamless. She had an odd leaning to the talk upon Cuper's boys. He was puzzled by what he might have classed, in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to incidents which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost their glow for her.
A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed to J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to Miss Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the girls had taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though the contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was. And then the girls heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited to proclaim himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had jumped on his legs and into the name of—one who was previously thought by Miss Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,' as Mr. Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian school- fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the land and shed Christian blood. Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon from his desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike, vilifying the infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'
'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
Weyburn said—
'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident.'
Her eyes, wherein the dead time hung just above the underlids, lingered, as with the wish for him to name the name.
She said: 'I am curious to hear how you would treat a case of that sort.
Would you preach to the boys?
'Ten words at most. The right assumption is that both fellows were to blame. I fancy the proper way would be to appeal to the naughty girls for their opinion as to how the dispute should be decided.'
'You impose too much on them. And you are not speaking seriously.'