and it is very silly of her to say things like that. I shall send
back his book and paper to-morrow morning by Andrew Kissock when
he goes to school." Still even after this resolution she lay
sleepless.

"Now I will go to sleep," said Winsome, resolutely shutting her
eyes. "I will not think about him any more." Which was assuredly a
noble and fitting resolve. But Winsome had yet to discover in
restless nights and troubled morrows that sleep and thought are
two gifts of God which do not come or go at man's bidding. In her
silent chamber there seemed to be a kind of hushed yet palpable
life. It seemed to Winsome as if there were about her a thousand
little whispering voices. Unseen presences flitted everywhere. She
could hear them laughing such wicked, mocking laughs. They were
clustering round the crumpled piece of paper in the corner. Well,
it might lie there forever for her.

"I would not read it even if it were light. I shall send it back
to him to-morrow without reading it. Very likely it is a Greek
exercise, at any rate."

Yet, for all these brave sayings, neither sleep nor dawn had come,
when, clad in shadowy white and the more manifest golden glimmer
of her hair, she glided to the windowseat, and drawing a great
knitted shawl about her, she sat, a slender figure enveloped from
head to foot in sheeny white. The shawl imprisoned the pillow
tossed masses of her rippling hair, throwing them forward about
her face, which, in the half light, seemed to be encircled with an
aureole of pale Florentine gold.