The present situation was no joke. But Youth preserves above all the property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!
The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy. He had no idea of finding a craven's refuge in suicide. The single shilling remaining to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining capital in that unpleasant alkaloid. And neither did it occur to him then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the Tower. For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.
He was not alone in the world. There was Monica. With the remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity, awakened in him the desire to see her. He turned his face Westward and stepped into the moving throng.
VII
The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement. Subsequently to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette Bayard had been summoned by an attendant lay-sister to the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.
She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of Cold Feet—so called in recognition of the fact that the apartment contained no fireplace, and that even in the hottest weather cool draughts played hide-and-seek across the polished parquet from circular brazen gratings inserted in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected with the presence of a French calorifère.
When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere about the middle of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol in the shape of a pupil of the Little Class, by name Laura Foljambe—happened to be buttoning a shoe-strap at the end of the corridor. The apoplectic attitude inseparable from this particular employment would have rendered observation impossible—in the case of an adult. But Laura, under the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow ringlets, unconfined by any comb or ribbon, observed, firstly, that Juliette had been crying, and secondly, that Mère M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes. More, she had called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and said: "We shall miss you, my dear!" "You will be brave, I know!" and "Remember to write!" Packed with news, Laura rushed into the Lesser Hall, where the seniors were gathered round the stove, the raw chill of the January weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.
Juliette must be going away! The forty girls of the Great Class had unanimously arrived at this conclusion when Juliette herself arrived upon the scene. It needed but a glance to assure her of the treachery of Laura; it needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering and protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her knees.
You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was angry, she was so with a vengeance. Heroic by temperament, her wrath smacked of the superhuman. A demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as semi-divine a frenzy. Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to convey such indignation. You expected hexameters or Alexandrines....