Love and Mr. Lewisham | Page 6

moment, but
nothing would come.
They discovered themselves hand in hand. They both laughed and felt
"silly." They shook hands in the manner of quite intimate friends, and
snatched their hands away awkwardly. She turned, glanced timidly at
him over her shoulder, and hesitated. "Good-bye," she said, and was
suddenly walking from him.
He bowed to her receding back, made a seventeenth-century sweep
with his college cap, and then some hitherto unexplored regions of his
mind flashed into revolt.
Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.
"I say," he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his
mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral. "But that
sheet of paper ..."
"Yes," she said surprised--quite naturally.
"May I have it?"
"Why?"
He felt a breathless pleasure, like that of sliding down a slope of snow.
"I would like to have it."
She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but his excitement was now too
great for smiling. "Look here!" she said, and displayed the sheet

crumpled into a ball. She laughed--with a touch of effort.
"I don't mind that," said Mr. Lewisham, laughing too. He captured the
paper by an insistent gesture and smoothed it out with fingers that
trembled.
"You don't mind?" he said.
"Mind what?"
"If I keep it?"
"Why should I?"
Pause. Their eyes met again. There was an odd constraint about both of
them, a palpitating interval of silence.
"I really must be going," she said suddenly, breaking the spell by an
effort. She turned about and left him with the crumpled piece of paper
in the fist that held the book, the other hand lifting the mortar board in a
dignified salute again.
He watched her receding figure. His heart was beating with remarkable
rapidity. How light, how living she seemed! Little round flakes of
sunlight raced down her as she went. She walked fast, then slowly,
looking sideways once or twice, but not back, until she reached the
park gates. Then she looked towards him, a remote friendly little figure,
made a gesture of farewell, and disappeared.
His face was flushed and his eyes bright. Curiously enough, he was out
of breath. He stared for a long time at the vacant end of the avenue.
Then he turned his eyes to his trophy gripped against the closed and
forgotten Horace in his hand.

CHAPTER III
.
THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.
On Sunday it was Lewisham's duty to accompany the boarders twice to
church. The boys sat in the gallery above the choirs facing the organ
loft and at right angles to the general congregation. It was a prominent
position, and made him feel painfully conspicuous, except in moods of
exceptional vanity, when he used to imagine that all these people were
thinking how his forehead and his certificates accorded. He thought a
lot in those days of his certificates and forehead, but little of his honest,
healthy face beneath it. (To tell the truth there was nothing very

wonderful about his forehead.) He rarely looked down the church, as he
fancied to do so would be to meet the collective eye of the congregation
regarding him. So that in the morning he was not able to see that the
Frobishers' pew was empty until the litany.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest
crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west
side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already
Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of
mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt
very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then
hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither
lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little
unexpected. Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to
pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him.... He entered church in a
mood of black despair.
But consolation of a sort came soon enough. As she took her seat she
distinctly glanced up at the gallery, and afterwards as he knelt to pray
he peeped between his fingers and saw her looking up again. She was
certainly not laughing at him.
In those days much of Lewisham's mind was still an unknown land to
him. He believed among other things that he was always the same
consistent intelligent human being, whereas under certain stimuli he
became no longer reasonable and disciplined but a purely imaginative
and emotional person. Music, for instance, carried him away, and
particularly the effect of many voices in unison whirled him off from
almost any state of mind to a fine massive emotionality.