'Oh, no,' she faltered; 'what are cedars and limestone as compared with
humanity?'

'And if I were without the Abbey--if the Abbey and I were nothing to each
other--should I be nobody in your sight?'

'It is difficult to dissociate a man from his surroundings,' she
answered; 'but I suppose you would be just the same person?'

'I hope so,' said Brian. '"The rank is but the guinea stamp, the man's a
man for a' that." But the guinea stamp is an uncommonly good thing in its
way, I admit.'

These afternoon promenades between four and five o'clock, while the rest
of the school was out walking, had been going on for a fortnight, and no
harm to Ida had come of her indiscretion. Perhaps she hardly considered
how wrong a thing she was doing in violating Miss Pew's confidence by
conduct so entirely averse from Miss Pew's ideas of good behaviour. The
confidence had been so grudgingly given, Miss Pew had been so
systematically unkind, that the girl may be forgiven for detesting her,
nay, even for glorying in the notion of acting in a manner which would
shock all Miss Pew's dearest prejudices. Her meeting with her lover could
scarcely be called clandestine, for she took very little pains to conceal
the fact. If the affair had gone on secretly for so long, it was because
of no artifice on her part.

But that any act of any member of the Mauleverer household could remain
long unknown was almost an impossibility. If there had been but one pair
of eyes in the establishment, and those the eyes of Miss Pillby, the
thing would have been discovered; for those pale unlovely orbs were as