Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. On a July morning, two years later, Candida awoke to the delightful consciousness that she was free at last from a state of pupilage, having triumphantly passed all her examinations, and that as soon as the holidays were over the post awaited her of assistant instructor at the Bloomsbury Gymnasium, at a salary of sixty pounds a year. Meanwhile, it was pleasant to think of Branksmead, where she would be before the evening, and the two months' holidays, which had been well-earned by the past half-year of hard work, mental as well as physical. Her mind, which up to her eighteenth year had been far less developed than her body, had since begun to work with a vigour that bade fair to make up very quickly for its past inertia. A course of novels and poetry, as prescribed by Mrs. Festus, had roused her imagination and awakened in her a taste for reading for its own sake. In her spare time she greedily devoured books on any and every subject—history, science, philosophy ; nothing came amiss to her, and it wasprobably chiefly due to the excellence of her physical condition that she escaped a bad attack of mental indigestion. But when the brain is overloaded or over-stimulated, nothing can be better adapted to restore its equilibrium than for its owner to turn somersaults on the trapeze, or to " circle " round the horizontal bar until she can scarcely distinguish her heels from her head. At nineteen, Candida had reached her full height of five feet nine, and she turned the scale at ten stone. In certain branches of her chosen profession she had gained considerable distinction, notably in those which required strength and nerve rather than grace or dexterity. She was an accomplished performer upon the horizontal and parallel bars, the vaulting- horse and swings. Her fencin... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.