How can the man do it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself to dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable beautiful eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed, and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow that was handy?
Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.
Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys.
There was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had, therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman--Time's present answer to the old riddle.

It seemed to him, that instead of sorting Lord Ormont's papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise.
According to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's moral aid against temptation.

He knew it as the one trusty antidote for him, who was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny.
Certainly it is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and Lord Ormont kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of paper in the dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there was nothing to grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them indulgently, if not benevolently.
Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and again a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin.

For he was well enough aware that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in drinking his praises of a brighter, were drowned.

They were dead; but here was she the bride of the proved hero.