position in the list. "But you
have _passed_ all right," she said. Neither could she grasp the
importance of evening study. "Of course I don't know," she said
judicially; "but I thought you were learning all day." She calculated
the time consumed by their walk as half an hour, "just one half hour;"
she forgot that he had to get to Chelsea and then to return to his
lodgings. Her customary tenderness was veiled by an only too apparent
resentment. First at him, and then when he protested, at Fate. "I
suppose it _has_ to be," she said. "Of course, it doesn't matter, I
suppose, if we _don't_ see each other quite so often," with a quiver
of pale lips.

He had returned from the parting with an uneasy mind, and that evening
had gone in the composition of a letter that was to make things
clearer. But his scientific studies rendered his prose style "hard,"
and things he could whisper he could not write. His justification
indeed did him no sort of justice. But her reception of it made her
seem a very unreasonable person. He had some violent fluctuations. At
times he was bitterly angry with her for her failure to see things as
he did. He would wander about the museum conducting imaginary
discussions with her and making even scathing remarks. At other times
he had to summon all his powers of acrid discipline and all his
memories of her resentful retorts, to keep himself from a headlong
rush to Chelsea and unmanly capitulation.

And this new disposition of things endured for two weeks. It did not
take Miss Heydinger all that time to discover that the disaster of the
examination had wrought a change in Lewisham. She perceived those
nightly walks were over. It was speedily evident to her that he was
working with a kind of dogged fury; he came early, he went late. The
wholesome freshness of his cheek paled. He was to be seen on each of
the late nights amidst a pile of diagrams and text-books in one of the
less draughty corners of the Educational Library, accumulating piles
of memoranda. And nightly in the Students' "club" he wrote a letter
addressed to a stationer's shop in Clapham, but that she did not see.
For the most part these letters were brief, for Lewisham, South
Kensington fashion, prided himself upon not being "literary," and some
of the more despatch-like wounded a heart perhaps too hungry for
tender words.

He did not meet Miss Heydinger's renewed advances with invariable
kindness. Yet something of the old relations were