did. Perhaps that too was part of his lucky disposition--he could get

along even with me. He always spread some sort of a weak charm about him, and this charm always disarmed me even, when to all intents and purposes he was merely rubbing in my horrible poverty. He would tell me, as if I wasn't already eating my heart out about it, that it was about time I made an effort--that _he_ wasn't going to remain in those stuffy diggings of his all _his_ days--and that if he had only half my brains he'd be up somewhere pretty high in a very short time (as he probably would had he lived)--all this, you understand, for my good, the cigarette gummed to his prettily shaped upper lip wagging as he talked, and with the best intentions in the world. He was quite devoted to me; would tell me how he had told other people about those extraordinary brains of mine; and he never dreamed (though it was not long before I began to) that our respective ages were even then making of our companionship a hopeless thing. A lad of seventeen may attach himself for a time to a man whose years number twenty-four of bitterness and exclusion, but they will part company again before the one is twenty-three and the other thirty.

I was only an evening student at the Business College, while Archie spent his days there. Often enough he did not turn up in the evening at all; indeed, he only began to do so with unfailing regularity some time after Evie Soames had put her name down for the social evening course of lectures on Business Method. Evie Soames was a day student too, though only on three days in the week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and the lectures on Method were given in the evening because they were specially addressed to those who, like myself, were employed during the day, and deemed to be ripe for the more advanced instruction. I don't think Archie was very much wiser for Weston's (our lecturer) efforts, but he was genuinely grateful to me for my explanations of them afterwards, and would pat me on the shoulder affectionately, and tell me he couldn't understand why everybody else didn't see what a rare good sort I was. That was his backhanded idea of a compliment.

I think, in those early days of mine, I hated pretty well everything and everybody; and I cannot better show you how little I found to love than by giving you, before I go on with my tale, an account of my day at that period of my life--any day taken at random will do.

I had to be at Rixon Tebb & Masters' by nine, why, I don't know, since nobody else of any account whatever turned up much before half-past ten. But eight of us had to be there by nine o'clock, and I will tell you how our eight had been got together.

You know--or don't you know?--that there are firms that contract for the supply of "office labour" of all grades, from the messenger boy to the beginning of the confidential clerks; holusbolus, in the lump, as much of it or as little as you please. You pay, if you are an employer, a certain number of hundreds a year, and the agency does the rest. One down, t'other up; sack one man, and telephone for another. The agency's supply, at the maximum of a pound a week, is practically unlimited, and the firm escapes all personal responsibility in regard to its staff.

I was one of these consignments of labour--or rather an eighth of one. I don't know now what I did. I know that I addressed envelopes and checked columns of figures and lists of names, quite devoid of meaning to me, and got eighteen shillings a week for it. There was no chance that I should ever get more than eighteen shillings. Ask for nineteen and the telephone rang, the agency was informed of your request, and ... well, three times I had seen that happen.

One chance of escape, indeed, we had; the firm was clever enough to allow us that. It was by way of what I may call the permanent junior clerkship. The permanent junior clerk was, as it were, breveted with the rank of the real clerks in the inner office; and so was hope dangled over the heads of eight of us. There was the junior clerkship amongst the eight of us. That or nothing.

I need hardly say that jealousy, espionage, and scheming besmirched our souls.

Well (to continue my account of my day), I addressed envelopes or read aloud from interminable lists until one o'clock, and then I lunched. This we were not allowed to do in the office, so that usually I ate from a paper bag in one of the quieter streets, or else had a scone and milk at an A.B.C. shop round the corner in Cheapside. I was alone. My fellow-stuff from the agency, always on the lookout for a pretext of mistrust, found one in my (I admit) uncommon face. I put in the time until two, when I was not smothering up annoyance at those who would turn round to stare at a man who had been made half a head taller than the rest of the world, in wondering whether those about me were as rich or worse off than I, and whether they were able to procure a bath as cheaply and easily; and then I returned to Rixon Tebb & Masters' again. At six-thirty I proceeded home, washed, and went out to dinner. I dined at one of the establishments near the corner of Pentonville Road; you have seen them, there is an arrangement of gas-jets behind a steamy window, and, in galvanised iron trays, sausages and onions and saveloys fry. The proprietor of the "pull-up" fetched my dinner out of the window on the prongs of a toasting fork, and I ate it in a small matchboard compartment, or, when these _cabinets particuliers_ happened to be all pre-occupied, at an oilcloth-covered table that ran down the middle of the shop. During and after my meal I read the whole of _The Echo_--I was allowed as a habitué to retain my seat longer than the casual diner. But on the nights on which I took a bath (did I say I sponged on Archie Merridew for this convenience, carrying my clean shirt in a paper that also served for the wrapping-up of the one I had removed?), I added to my obligation by supping with him also, and then we walked on to the Business College together. My clothes I bought in Lamb's Conduit Street, my boots in Red Lion Passage. I had always the greatest difficulty in getting a fit in either. At one time I had the misfortune to make myself very unpopular among the proprietors of a row of barrows not far from Southampton Row. This was over the purchase of a collar, and the cub under the naphtha lamp had made some joke or other about the uncommon size I required, saying that the horse collars were to be had in St Martin's Lane. The blow under the ear I gave him was heavier than I intended; I am afraid I broke his jaw, and I avoided the street for a long time.

After the class, I either continued my studies, as I have said, with young Merridew, or else took a walk. In this again I was always alone. I went far afield. If I went west, I usually turned along Great Russell and Guildford Streets, but the moths, English and foreign, of the half light of this last thoroughfare caused me at one time to take the way of Holborn and Gray's Inn Road. The nickname they gave me, they also gave, I don't doubt, to fifty men besides myself, but it seemed somehow to attach itself more conspicuously to me because of my general conspicuousness. It was that of the mysterious and ubiquitous author of a series of unelucidated crimes as to the nature of which I need not be specific.

Then, when I had walked my fill, I returned to my cage opposite the red and green electric advertisement.

This is a fair sample of my days at that time.

II

There is a showy boot shop now where the Business College used to be; the new place is in Kingsway. There, in Kingsway, I am told they have methods and appliances undreamed of in my time--mechanical calculators, wonderful filing systems, elaborate duplicators, and lectures on Commercial and Political Economy and Mercantile Law--but the old Holborn curriculum included shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, and lectures on method and not very much besides. When I left, I remember, they were just beginning, as a high novelty, advertisement-writing. Later, I myself took this class, though only for a few weeks.

Even then, I think, the Holborn place was condemned to come down. A second-hand book shop occupied the ground floor; and above the book shop window three columns, each of three bow windows, one for each floor, formed the frontage. The three bow windows of the top floor were ours. Inside, the place was small and inconvenient in the extreme. It had been a dwelling-house once, and the old fixtures still remained--dark cauliflower wallpapers, heavy ornamental gas-brackets, and little porcelain fittings by the fireplaces that still rang, in the second of the two rooms that had been knocked into one to form a lecture-room, a row of bells that resembled a series of interrogation marks.

Only four women attended the classes. The business woman was, comparatively speaking, a rarity then, nor can I quite make up my mind as to how much things have changed in this respect and how much they remain exactly as they were. They have certainly changed if it is all on account of her certificate that a young woman can now walk into an office and be promptly asked at what hour it will be convenient for her to begin her duties on the morrow; and, lacking certificates, three of our four students could hardly have fallen back on any natural diploma of personal charms. I mean, in a word, that Miss Windus, Miss Causton and Miss Levey were, to say the least, not remarkably pretty, though Miss Causton was beautiful as far as her figure and movements went.

But Evie Soames was very different. She was, in actual years, twenty; but she seemed still to stand among the debris of her teens as an opening tree stands over its sprinkling of delicate fallen sheaths in the spring. Both graces and awkwardnesses of an earlier time still clung, as it were, to her stem. She had, as I later learned, been at one school until she was seventeen, at a second school until she was nineteen, and now, after a year of indetermination and arrested development at home, was still further delaying her maturity by beginning again not very differently from the way in which she had begun at fourteen. She had, of course, picked up a number of unimportant acquirements by the way, but had never, in those days when I first knew her, given it a thought that Evie Soames was a person Evie Soames might well have some natural curiosity about. She moved, neither woman nor schoolgirl, among the charts and files and dusty ledgers of the Business College, slender, dark, necked like a birch, and with eyes than which, when she looked suddenly round, the flash of a negro's teeth was not whiter.

I have told you how my days were passed, but not yet said anything about my dreams. As I cannot speak of Evie Soames apart from these I will do so as briefly as I can.

Whatever else in my life I may have been, I have not, even in my dreams, been a sensualist. It might in some respects have been better for me if I had. But so far was I from that that I have even been charged (though the charge is really as wide of the mark as it could well be) with a certain inhumanity; by which I mean, not cruelty, but--how shall I express it?--a certain inaccessibility to the ordinary human relation. And I do not believe the woman lives who, given her choice of these two interpretations of the word, would not prefer the former. Only in the latter does she foresee her final defeat.

Therefore, when at midday in Cheapside, or in Guildford Street as I returned from my lonely rambles, or in Holborn or Oxford Street at the hour when shops and offices turned out their human contents, male and female, after the day's work, I watched the pattering feet on the pavements, I was not stirred as the fleshly stockbrocker or conscienceless "blood" is stirred. (You must allow me this generalisation; you know what I mean.) My eyes did not meet other eyes as seeking acquaintance. I never, in train or tram or 'bus, set off my vacation of my seat for a woman against the bow or thanks I might receive. I never, even at my loneliest, held a waitress or attendant in talk for any satisfaction I had in her nearness. Whatever I have learned from crowds, crowds have had nothing of mine. Nor, my heavy and immobile appearance notwithstanding, was I (I affirm this) a solitary because I was refused acquaintanceship. I was a solitary because I refused it.

But what I refused in the streets by day, I could not sleep for seeking when I lay down at night. What I sought I did not and do not know; I was only conscious of a hunger within myself that, not being satisfiable by the eye-profferings and other partial prettinesses of the crowd, were never offered that sustenance. I have heard this hunger described as a Divine Discontent, but that is to beg a question of some magnitude. It might be a very different thing from that. It might just conceivably be an Infernal Discontent. Or it might, in the case of a man who regarded neither God nor devil--But I wander. This, I say, was my dream, and I shared it with no sensualist.

Of course you have already guessed why I say all this ... guessed what happened. Between the commonnesses under the street lamps which I spurned, and those dreams that were ever unseizably beyond my most ardent reaching forth, I fell in love with Evie Soames.

* * * * *

There are, I know, men in whom a grim and uncompromising aspect is so richly compensated for by other gifts that, like John Wilkes, they may fairly brag that with fifteen minutes' start they would out-distance in a woman's favours the most regular-featured buck in London. Therefore (if I may use a "therefore" without egregiousness) it troubled me little that Miss Windus, not to speak of her two companions, Miss Causton and Miss Levey, found me unattractive. In that coin I could have repaid her, had I wished, with interest. Since I did not wish, my attitude was one of fully-armed reserve. All three of these women seemed to me to be for ever proclaiming, if not in words, yet in everything but words, that men, _as_ men, have worldly opportunities given them by a sort of favouritism, and as a kind of present for their circumspection in getting themselves born men--as if in this world either men or women ever got anything they were not quick enough or strong enough or callous enough to seize for themselves. Miss Windus in especial, a sharp-featured woman of twenty-eight, with apertures like little scalene triangles out of which her eyes peered with an expression quizzical and weak and yet perky and self-confident at the same time (as if she was saying perpetually to herself, "We may as well hear what _this_ one has to say for himself!") struck me as being the final word in self-importance and inefficiency.

The top-heavy little Jewess, Miss Levey, was a very broker for gossip and tattle, and the remarks she occasionally made about others to me were quite enough to warn me that she would make equally free with myself to others. Both she and Miss Windus seemed to shout aloud the very sex-difference the existence of which they seemed at the same time to be denying. They "could not think of giving trouble" when one or other of the forty men placed a chair or adjusted a light or carried a Remington for them; but they would have known how to show their sense of the absence of such attentions all the same.

I do not know that Miss Causton pleased me very much more, but she at any rate moved with a wonderful physical harmonious grace and flow. If one might judge from her hands and wrists (a business certificate on which she ever bestowed the most sedulous care) she did not come from quite the same social level as the other two--was, perhaps, the daughter of a doctor who had married his house-keeper, or of a decent governess whose decency had not prevented her from running off with a groom; but I made no attempt to unravel either this riddle or any other that her rather contemptuous grey eyes might contain. The attitudes she took in reaching down a book from a shelf or passing her arm about the waist of one of the other girls when they assembled for gossip were all I wanted of her, and those began and remained a purely æsthetic satisfaction.

Therefore there could hardly have been a more complete contrast than there was between these apparently a-sexual yet in reality excessively sex-conscious women and my delicate unawakened Evie Soames. She made no more difficulty about giving me a "Good-evening," or "Good-night" than she did with the rest of the world; and though for a long time our speech stopped at that, it was yet as much as I had with any other woman whomsoever. That I should get even thus much of what everybody else in the world seemed to get as a matter of course came so gently and softly over me that I did not dream of a worse misery that might lurk hidden within it, and in those early days of my love a mother would not have fought more wildly for her babe than I would have turned on any who had offered to come between me and even this sparse sweetness that had come for the first time into my life.

III

The events I am now about to relate occurred during those early days, while I was still content to possess my dreams, as if as long as I closed my eyes the world would stand still about me.

One November night, as the series of lectures on Method was drawing to a close, I returned with Archie Merridew to his rooms, silent, but exceedingly happy. The cause of my happiness will not greatly excite you, it had been no more than Evie's "Good-night, Mr Jeffries," given me as I had waited on the stairs of the college for young Merridew, who had lingered behind to ask Weston something or other.

I had heard them coming down from the landing above, and, looking up, had seen the trail of Miss Causton's long grey coat and Miss Windus's blue and green plaid skirt and her gloved hand on the shaky old rail. I ought to say that the western-most of the three pillars of bow windows I have mentioned as forming the Holborn frontage of the college was the one that lighted the various floors of the staircase, and if parties had ever been given in that old house before it had got quite so old, it is odds that the embrasure in which I had just then been standing, that of the first floor, had held a few palms in pots and a couple of figures on its low window-seat many a time. But that night it had only held myself, waiting in the shadow shaped like a coffin-shoulder that the globeless gas of the landing cast.

I had heard Miss Windus's little smothered exclamation. "_Oh!..._ That man!" but instantly she had gone on talking in a higher voice. Certainly she had had reasonable colour for the pretence that she had not seen me--had I not happened to hear her exclamation.

And if I had heard it, so, of course, had Evie.

"Good-night, Mr Jeffries," Evie had said as she had passed me, and Miss Windus also, as if suddenly discovering me, had given me quite a bright "Good-night!" Miss Causton also had given me a languid, almost insolent smile.

I was happy. I should probably have taken myself and my happiness off somewhere had it not been that that evening I had made use of Archie's bath, and had left in his place, besides that paper parcel I have mentioned, a notebook of which I had need. So I had returned with Archie, and, not intending to stay, had yet sat down, overcoated as I was, before his fire.

"Better take your coat off for a bit," Archie said. "I'd like a squint at your notes too, if you're not in a hurry."

The notes were part of our preparation for the examination in Method which was to be held shortly before Christmas. I threw apart, but still did not remove my coat, and Archie took up my notebook and read as he stood. Presently, feeling for a chair with his foot, he sat down, still reading the notes.

He looked up from time to time, but the questions he put barely interrupted my reverie. I stared at the fire in the pretty old-fashioned grate. He had no gas up there; his cardboard lamp-shade, green outside and a little heat-browned inside, stood on a chenille-clothed table; and he had given the shade a tilt for his convenience in reading. Thus the fireplace end of the room lay in a sort of irregular parabola of illumination. There were bright circles on the ceiling above the chimney of the lamp; then came spaces of cosy gloom; and below, in the pleasant light, were his arm-chairs, his small book-shelf, and, the rail of it catching the firelight, his high perforated brass fender. In the middle of a great cam of light that lay over the dimity-papered wall between his sitting and bed rooms, his dressing-gown, hanging from a hook in the bedroom door, made a grotesquely human-shaped shadow.

By-and-by, with the book on his knee and his eyes still fixed on it, Archie began mechanically to unlace his boots. I looked up as he reached for his slippers, and then resumed my reverie.

I was glad that Kitty Windus, whether she realised it or not, had been made the subject of an innocently awkward little snub. I couldn't stand the woman. I couldn't stand it that, ignoring my existence when she could, she spoke to me, when she did speak, with a false vivacity that only enhanced the effect of her passing over at other times. And lest you should think I was wasting my detestation on a rather insignificant object, I must ask you again to remember what my days were. The whole Scheme of Things seemed to be against me; but there is not much relief to be had from taking a blind fling at the Scheme of Things. A man with a grudge against the world will be very likely indeed to take that grudge out of the nearest person. I was not prosperous enough to have much time to waste on human charities. So, in my resentful hours, I took it mercilessly out of one against whom, in my calmer moments, I had no grudge except that she was not a thousand miles away. And if she had been a thousand miles away, I should have vented my bitterness on somebody else. I had to get rid of it somehow.

But if my thoughts gave Miss Windus more of this than she fairly deserved, perhaps Evie Soames got more in another sort than she deserved either. There was not one of the few stray graces and sweetnesses I had ever known that did not accrete to and abide about the thought of her. No generous emotion, no human impulse I had ever experienced, but came with adoration and rich gifts with which to exalt her. In my heart I lighted tapers about her image. I did not ask myself whether she had supplanted my dreams, existed side by side with them, or was indeed my dreaming made truth. I did not wonder what she might have been in another man's dreaming, nor whether, apart from the dreaming of some man, she existed spiritually at all. I only knew that the fire inside Archie Merridew's fender was not warmer than that central warmth that seemed to steal (as if there also some bud-sheath had yielded) about my heart as I pictured again her sapling-straight figure, the flash of her turning eyes on the landing, and the tone in which she had bidden me good-night three quarters of an hour before. I leaned back as it were in some longed-for luxurious resting-place of the heart. I do not know the origin of the tears that gathered in my eyes.

Suddenly Archie threw the book on to the table and stretched himself. He gave a yawn and put his feet on the fender.

"Oh, I'm sick of work for to-day!" he said. "When are you going to start smoking?" he added as he drew out a cigarette-case.

I answered something or other--it didn't matter what, since my lovely moment had gone with the breaking in of his voice.

"Oh, well!..." he laughed, lighting up. Then, glancing at the blowing end before throwing his match into the fender, he said: "I say--what a jolly sort of girl that Miss Soames seems to be!"

As the cold of a spring night freezes the newly mounting sap of a tree, so I felt some sweet and vigorous change suddenly arrested in my heart.

"Wh-who?" I said. I had to make two attempts at it.

He laughed.

"Oh, of course--I forgot, girls don't interest you. Like your not smoking, I suppose. Hadn't noticed there were any girls at the college--only see text-books and Remingtons.... Well, not to spring it on you too suddenly, there _are_ four girls there, three of 'em rather sticks, but the fourth a ripper. What a rum chap you are!" he concluded with another laugh.

He had drawn his chair still closer to the fire, and now sat with his feet, not on the fender, but half-way up one of the pilasters that supported the chimneypiece. As he kicked off one slipper and began to warm one small foot on the iron-work just inside the pilaster, his profile was turned to me; but I didn't at first risk stealing a look at it for fear of meeting his eyes. Stealthily, however, and moving my head as little as possible, I did so. It was a pretty profile--fair curly hair thick on the crown, his head rather high at the back and of a long shape to the chin, good nose, pleasantly curved mouth--the head of a decent enough but quite unremarkable youngster of twenty-two. He was neatly dressed in a grey stripe, and wore a black-bound red waistcoat with brass buttons. I say he was decent enough, and so he was: I knew he knew the taste of whiskey, but don't think he drank it very often. "Good wholesome beer," he used to say with an air of experience, "was more his mark"; but even then I think the experience was more that of his companions than his own. You wouldn't have said there was much harm in him, and he would probably have to spend his allowance unwisely once or twice before he learned to spend it wisely.

I made the moving of my chair an excuse for getting him better under observation.

"Oh yes, awfully jolly," he repeated, blowing a plume of smoke through which the firelight shone rustily. "Fun ... no end of fun ... rather!..."

Then he smiled, and the smile came and went and came again as he smoked.

I don't know why, up to that moment, I had never thought of it--never thought of how it might already be or might presently become. I suppose the reason was that a man cannot hold the commerce I held with dreams without to some extent losing his touch of actuality. But now, at last, I was awake enough.... As if the room had turned colder I pulled my coat a little more closely about me.

It was not then that that heart of mine, which I have likened to a bud suddenly arrested in the moment of its unfolding, became more likenable to a grenade with its fuse waiting exposed for the spark that should bring destruction....

But I was quite calm. For the matter of that, I am never anything else when it comes to the point. My angers have served their purpose when they have brought me to the point. I _use_ anger.... Therefore, though I knew already that three careless words of his had opened an immeasurable abyss between us, I was able to speak to him without a tremor, from my chair at one side of his hearth to him in his own at the other.

"You mean Miss----What's her name?"

"Soames," he informed me. "You know--that young girl--you must have seen her.... Yes, full of fun.... I laughed.... I did laugh!"

From the way in which he still laughed there must have been a specific occasion for his mirth. I knew of none such. I wished to know, however, and I also wished to know what he meant by "fun." Young men mean so many things by "fun," and it--But I stifled something within my breast almost before it was born there. When I spoke, my voice was as steady as it has ever been in my life; but the devil, watching a soul that hesitates on the point of sin, does not watch more closely than I watched that fair boy with the cigarette dangling from his upper lip.

"Ah, yes, I've seen her.... _Pretty, too_," I hinted.

But he put, if he heard, her prettiness aside. He chuckled again.

"I went last Sunday to the Zoo, you know," he said. "They were spending the week-end in town--my folks. And I saw her there. Or rather, I didn't see her at first, it was Mumsie who saw her. 'I think there's somebody you know,' she says to me, and I looked, and there she was, bowing to me. Then up came pater--he'd dropped behind somewhere--and blest if he didn't know her aunt--she lives with her aunt--they have rooms in Woburn Place. So we all went round together.... I started the fun by saying how like old Weston the secretary bird was; so we went round looking for likenesses--raked up everybody we knew----" He stopped, suddenly.

He wouldn't, had he been a year or two older, have pulled himself up quite so sharply. It is true he didn't go so far as to colour, stammer, or bite his lip; but his meaning, or his inadvertence, or whatever you like to call it, could hardly have been plainer had he done all these things. An anecdote was related to me not so very long ago by an agent I employ to advise me in my picture-buying. It was of the most sardonic of our caricaturists, and this merciless artist had (so the story ran) refused to caricature a certain person, giving as his reason that, while a vain or over-praised or too consciously handsome face was fair game for his ironic pencil, a face already heavily visited by nature went free. But for Archie Merridew's sudden embarrassed check I might have imagined that _my_ own visage might have gone free also. It is, after all, not repellent. I bear quite a strong resemblance to at least one public man whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers--a distinguished scientist. My stature is the most striking thing about me, and if your humour takes that turn you can find remote suggestions of any number of people at the Zoo.

I made, however, no sign, and he, judging his clumsiness to have passed unnoticed, went on:

"Funny the pater knowing her aunt like that, wasn't it? Rather fun though. Mumsie said she must come down to Guildford for a few days and stay with us; if she does I shall go home that week-end--you bet!"

My answer gave me no pain. It came, I think, out of just such an automatic reflex as causes an "opening" in conversation to call forth its own obvious reply. It would have been more marked not to say it than to say it, and as I am telling you, in my state of still tension it didn't hurt.

"Oh!" I said. "And when does one congratulate you?"

"What d'you mean?" he asked.

"Why, on your engagement."

Instantly I knew I had said the right thing. There was nothing either false or forced about the little exclamation he made, half scoff, half laugh. His face was clear as crystal. By "fun" he meant, simply, mere physiological laughter, the bubbling-up of the high spirits of his years. Human resemblances at the Zoo are quite enough to call up this purely functional giggling. She was "fun" (the odds were a thousand to one) as his sister might have been fun; with a certain freshness and sense of discovery perhaps, but otherwise not very differently. In spite of the sequel, I still think I am right in making this statement.

"Don't be an idiot!" he said.... "I say, Jeff, I couldn't quite make out that about indexing and cross-references to-night. Did he mean that the cross-references are a sort of double entry for when the subjects overlap, or what?"

But there was still something I wished to verify.

"Who?" I asked. "The--secretary bird?"

This time I think he did colour faintly, but as he had swung his legs down from the fireplace and was reaching for my notebook again I could not be quite sure.

"Pass me the book," I said.

For the next quarter of an hour I gave him as collected and lucid an explanation of his difficulties as if I had had no other care in the world. Then I lifted myself up. I buttoned my coat, put the notebook into my pocket, and briefly recapitulated what I had told him.

"Thanks, awfully," he said gratefully, when I had finished. "You are a brick. _You_ ought to give the lectures instead of old Weston. I'm sure if I pass this exam it will be all you. Must you go?"

"Must."

"Well--so long--I think I'll make a few notes myself before I forget again."

And, still master of myself, I left him arranging papers and feeling in his inkstand for a pen.

IV

I do not know but what I might still have retained control of myself when I got out into the street again; I do not know, because I didn't try. Instead, no sooner had I got away from him than I went temporarily all to pieces. I remember I passed up Charlotte Street and turned into Mecklenburgh Square; and there I leaned against the railings of the garden that occupies the middle of the Square. I stood with my shoulder against them, looking stupidly down at my feet. There was a thin and melancholy mist; the lights of the boarding-houses and nursing-homes of the east side of the Square struggled through it with difficulty, and presently I found that my foot was playing absently with a few sodden plane-tree leaves that had drifted against the kerb.

Slowly, as I stood there, my stupidity gave place to a dull anger. I don't think it was anger against anybody in particular; it was as objectless as it was useless and exhausting. But if you have had that gall in your mouth that makes all the world taste bitter, you will understand my miserable rage. This changed presently to a shivering, weeping rage The wide portalled door of a house opposite opened, and a servant-girl came down the shallow steps to post a letter; I daresay she supposed I was unwell or a drunkard; and a passer-by might have concluded that I had an assignation with her, or had just had a quarrel.

Then, when I had had a little ease of my anger, I pulled myself together and banished it again. Now that I had come, tardily enough, out of my fool's paradise of the past weeks, I had other things than purposeless anger to think of. I moved away from the railings; the maid, returning from the posting of her letter, quickened her steps to avoid me; and I walked slowly northeastward through the Square.

Quickly I became calmer still. Soon I was calm enough to recognise that I needed this. "What," I said ironically to myself, thunder-struck at a thing so very surprising! "Did you think that because your head was in the clouds ... come, come, you'd better look at the thing; you mayn't have any too much time, you know; if I were you I'd take a walk and think it out."

I turned into Grays Inn Road, and began to take my own advice.

While I had no reason to suppose that she had fallen in love with him, I knew almost for a certainty that he had not with her. He was not at that stage yet. Already he was nibbling at other pleasures, and with a youngster of his kind one or two nibbles mean three or four. They may even mean ten or twelve. So far so good. I was still in time. I was, in fact, so far beforehand that, of the three of us, I was probably the only one who knew, not what had happened (which was nothing) but what might happen--which was everything. That I took for the starting-point of my consideration.

And I saw that that, at the outset, was an enormous advantage to me. Not only could I watch events, but I could watch them to infinitely better purpose that I knew what to look for. They, when it came--the "it" I had in my mind--(I ought rather to say did I suffer it to come) would not, in the bewildering wonder of it, know what had overtaken them; while I, by a timely use of care and skill, might even turn to advantage those disadvantages of mine which, huge as a church, might have been deemed to outweigh everything else. No more perfect cover for hidden motion could have been devised than I already possessed. Who suspects, of anything, one whom to suspect would on the face of it be absurd? I could, did I find this necessary, use practically the whole of my conspicuous life and narrow circumstances as a screen.

I reached the top of Gray's Inn Road, crossed to St Pancras Station, and, following the line of coal merchants' offices on the left side of the road, plunged into the shadows of the Somers Town arches. It was there that I thought of another thing that I must interrupt my meditation to acquaint you with.

You may have wondered why, if all young Merridew said about my brains was true, I had still, after some years as an agency clerk at Rixon Tebb & Masters', not been able to get away from the place. Well, the answer to that is involved in a hundred other things that have ended, after fifteen years, in my now being able to write this chapter of my personal history at a great square mahogany and leather writing-table, with two softly-shaded electric standards upon it, and, containing it, a lofty panelled study, rich and quiet, with a carpet soft as thymy turf and my pictures and carvings and cabinets mirrored in floor-borders, brown and deep as the pools of my Irish trout stream. You do not want the whole of that long story. I will tell you as much as is necessary here. The rest I may tell at some other time.

The truth was that I _had_ left Rixon Tebb & Masters'--had left the place, and had achieved the seeming miracle of being permitted to return. Such a marvel was without precedent, and I cannot say that it had been accomplished altogether by my own contrivance. I said a little while ago that there were eight of us, had over in a lump from the agency; I also said that only by way of the junior clerkship was any advancement possible from that slavery of addressing envelopes that might have been for company circularisation or might have been sent over in shiploads to the Flushing and Middleburg book-makers for all we knew; and I had had the signal luck--I forgot this when I said that luck had always passed me by on the other side--to present myself for reappointment, without any hope whatever of getting it, at the very moment when Polwhele had succeeded to this post.

How Polwhele had chanced to be occupied as he had been occupied when I had presented myself I understand only too well. Sneaking, prying, slandering, peaching--you didn't become Rixon Tebb & Masters' junior clerk without having been through the mill of all this and more. Poor worm, he had got so used to it that he couldn't help it. Having attained to the junior clerkship, he was going to work up through the seniors by the same means, I suppose, and the means he had been making use of, at the moment of my coming upon him, had been the furtive rummaging of a waste-paper basket that had come--I knew this by the pattern of it--from Mr Masters' private office.

It had been, of course, the perfect opportunity for me, who was subdued to sneaking and peaching also. I had leaned my elbow on the brass rail of a tall desk and stood looking down on him--such a long way down it seemed--he was on his knees.

"Hallo, Polwhele!" I had suddenly said. "Going to put Samson Evitt out of business?" And then I waited to see how he took it.

I don't suppose you've ever heard of Samson Evitt. He has been a solicitor; at that time he described himself as a waste-paper dealer; and what he really did, and for all I know does still, was to buy up, through a hundred miserable agents, and on the chance of coming upon some private letter or secret draft, the contents of such receptacles as Polwhele's fingers had been deep in at that moment.

"Going to start in Samson's line, are you, Polwhele?"

The colour of his face had changed as swiftly as that of the electric advertisement opposite my bedroom at King's Cross. He had gone as white as chalk. I had known perfectly well that he wasn't going to sell anything to Samson Evitt, but was merely playing his own hand with the firm; but he'd had no business at all with Mr Masters' waste-paper basket, and knew it. It had been rather horrible, but I had known I was as good as reinstated already.

"I'm coming back, Polwhele," I had said.

He had not spoken--only looked at me with eyes full of terror.

"You're going to see that I come back, Polwhele," I had informed him.

"My God, Jeffries, you wouldn't have the heart."

"Oh no--not as long as I come back."

Then swiftly he had seen his years of shifts and meannesses all wasted unless....

"Oh my God! How can I do it?" he had groaned.

"I don't know, Polwhele."

I did not know, nor do I know now how he did it. Men do impossible things when they've got to. That had been on a Friday evening, at a quarter to seven (the zeal of a new junior clerk always kept him after the others had gone). I had given him Monday in which to see to it. On the Tuesday morning, at nine o'clock, I had been back at my envelope addressing again. These things have to be done sometimes. And I need hardly add that now Polwhele would have turned up at my funeral with a smile on his lips and a nosegay in his buttonhole.

Of the period between my leaving Rixon Tebb & Masters' and my return thither I will not speak. You may guess at the nature of its experiences from the fact that I was thankful to get back to my lists and addresses again.

It would have surprised my fellow-clerks, who saw in me one as listless as themselves, to learn with what unresting energy I had worked since then. I had resolved that my next leap from that frying-pan should not be into the fire, and the means by which I was making sure of this was the Business College in Holborn. I knew my great natural gifts and the power that smouldered within me, but I had also learned, and in a school where the lessons were well driven home, that power and natural gifts were, for a man in my position, practically worthless unless they were supplemented and guaranteed. I had got to get myself certificated.

I don't know what certificates have come to mean nowadays, sometimes, I fear, very little. They seem to me to have lowered the standard with the utmost recklessness. I would not, in my own business, give a pound a dozen for some of these artificially achieved successes that are offered to me almost every day in the week, and it causes me no surprise whatever when I see the highly certificated also unemployed.... But it was rather different then. Once more I have forgotten my luck and railed at the goddess. It was my luck to be certificated while certificates still had a value, and for a year and a half I had drifted through my occupation by day but worked with an almost demoniac energy by night in order that I might not miss a single one of these tickets of authenticity that it was possible for me to obtain. A First Honours in Method would now complete my equipment.

And, looking back now, I wonder how much superstition there was in it that I wanted all the changes I was planning to come at once. For I meant that the break, when it did come, should be clean and final. As long as I remained with Rixon Tebb & Masters' my wretched single room at King's Cross was quite good enough for an agency clerk; when I left Rixon Tebb & Masters' I would leave those quarters also. Until then, I don't think you could have dragged me out, so strongly had I this feeling. Superstition or what you like, it had, for me, the force of a large and wise, if not yet fully worked out strategy. They tried, of course, at the Business College in Holborn, just as they are now trying at the new place in Kingsway, to teach us this larger generalship of waiting, withholding, massing, concentration, and then the swift development and advance; but I don't think it was much good. You don't get these things in return for so many guineas a year in fees. But I felt their stirrings then.... I hope I have made it plain that neither at the place in Kingsway, nor in my sordid lodgings over the public-house, nor under the arches of Somers Town that night, was I wasting my time.

And now, like a match to all that I had prepared and was preparing, had come the kindling thought of Evie Soames.

I remember I walked to Hampstead that night, revolving it all. Walking always steadies me, and by the time I had reached the Lower Heath the mechanical calculators at the new place in Kingsway do not work more coldly and mathematically than my brain had begun to work. The advantages I possessed, which had been the first thing to rush into my head, I allowed for the present to take care of themselves; I now envisaged my disadvantages.

You may imagine that these were terrifying.... I counted them, and was unable to check my groans when, thinking I had come to the end of them, yet another sprang up, stabbing me as it were from behind. They might almost have been veritable assassins, springing out from behind the dark bushes and copses near the Vale of Health among which I wandered.... Think of them! Think of them!

They, he and she, were of an age, or nearly; I seven years the senior of the elder of them. They met on three days a week at the college, met doubtless to snigger together over their "fun," only on three evenings could I see her. Her people apparently knew his; she would go down to Guildford, and my fancy might picture them, together there, taking walks, telling stories over the fire, laughing at chance resemblances at the Zoo. And all this time I should not cease for a moment to labour at that garden of my ambition above the brown mould of which not a green shoot yet showed. How (you must remember I was desperately facing the worst that could happen and not the best)--how could they help but fall in love? What would it be possible for me to do but to discover the thing after it had happened? And when it had happened, what was there then to be done?

But I need not force all this upon you. You will see for yourself. Look at it, then, and tell me where you would have conceived the odds to lie--with my possibly large-planning but certainly slow-executing brain, or with them and their opportunities and luck and gifts of circumstance and nature, demolishable singly perhaps, but well-nigh invincible in the sum of them?

I weighed it as I strayed and stubbled about the benighted Heath.

I returned from Hampstead at three o'clock in the morning. My horror of red and green had long since been switched off, and I got into bed during the only quiet interval that noisy and populous corner ever knew. I had now balanced advantages and disadvantages together, and was recapitulating the whole. Examining, setting aside, bringing forward again to re-examine in other aspects, setting aside again, checking, dismissing, estimating--my brain worked like a ticking instrument. Clocks struck, but still I pondered; and I was as free from anger now as if it had been another, not I, who had sought the support of the railings in Mecklenburgh Square.

And there dominated all my machination the single thought, that by no slip or carelessness or overlooked detail must they be made aware that I was watching them as a masked thief watches the uneasy sleeper upon the bed.

V

It was at Rixon Tebb & Masters' that I first began to know jealousy, or at least the image of it. I find I must say a little more about this place in which I spent my days at that time.

I have said that Polwhele hated me; but nobody loved anybody else at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. I have worked in offices that have been not bad fun at all; offices where the fellows formed a sort of family, as they did afterwards at the Freight & Ballast Company, with something not unlike the family bond, the family jokes, and an interchange each morning of the adventures of the night before not unlike the exchange of items of news from letters about a family breakfast-table; but there was nothing like that at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. There, one of us could scarcely glance up over the little brass rail at his desk-head without seeing, across the spaces where the green porcelain cones of the incandescents hung, another furtive pair of eyes meeting his own and looking almost guiltily away again. If the partners despised us for our cringing before them they were right; we were a despicable set. I don't think a friendship was ever struck up in the place. We hated, if for no other reason, than because each of us knew his neighbour to be as contemptible as he knew himself to be.

It was in this atmosphere that I wrapped myself about with the thought of Evie Soames. My routine work taxed my attention little; I could do it as well as it needed to be done and live a whole free inner life at the same time; and I was sometimes actually startled when, looking up after some lapse and interim in which I had seen nothing but the shape of Evie's birch-like neck and the brilliant motion of her eyes, I saw the crafty gaze of a fellow-clerk on my face. Once I met Sutt's eyes in this way; I knew his thought, namely, that he surmised the nature of mine; and he smiled, a mean sort of smile. He didn't smile twice, though, while I was there. I don't mean that I said or did anything, but I think he knew what my look meant.... All the same there got about the office--or rather about the corners and lavatories and behind screens, for it never came nearer to me than that--the only joke I remember ever to have been born there--the joke that Jeffries had all the appearance of a man in love. I took the hint. Thenceforward, as far as I might, I did not allow the faintest flicker of an emotion to cross my face. And more than ever was I on my guard lest I should do so in a place where it would have mattered more than it did at Rixon Tebb & Masters'.

Then, long before I knew of any valid grounds for them, and before a brain less prospectively active than mine would as much as dreamed of them, came these jealousies. Perhaps, like my occasional angers and like that secret fragrant flame of my love, they were emotions at large, unattached to any person but bound sooner or later to become so attached, and already seeking a quarter in which to alight.

They wrung my heart. Hot flushes and rages sometimes came upon me with no warning whatever. Sometimes in the middle of a column of figures or a twelve-inch-high stack of addresses, a devil would slyly lift its head--the thought that while I sat there polishing my trousers on a tall stool and the wrist of my sleeve on my desk, he and my Evie were--where?... I have in a remarkable degree that most precious and most hideous of gifts, the gift of mental visualisation, at these times it would have its way with me. I would see them in those moments where I would and engaged how I would. Well nigh as clearly as I see the page before me, I would see him, long boyish head and fair curly hair, red waistcoat and cigarette, and turned-up trousers and all, now making pretexts that something was wrong with her typewriter, now carrying a specimen ledger for her, now choosing for himself a place from which he could watch her, or even passing on to her the explanations of knots and difficulties he had had the previous evening from myself. My fancy (my reason at these times its helpless slave) would dog them--past the general room into the lecture-room--thence to the back room where the charts and apparatus were kept--thence back again through the lecture room into the shorthand and typewriting and senior class rooms, and so throughout every corner behind our three Holborn bow windows. There were times when I used all my powers of concentration to see one of them without the other, and failed.... And then the fit would pass and my steady reason would reassert itself. I would tell myself I was a fool to thrust knives into myself thus. She was merely that touchingly opening fair young tree; and as for him, if his young male swaggerings in the pride of his twenty-two years included any knowledge of girls at all, they were probably girls of a very different class from hers.

Then would come the other damnable series again, and the sweat would stand on my brow.

No wonder Sutt looked.

Yet I am not sure that, for the sake of certain purely heavenly hours, I would not go through it all again. Would you suppose that in that five-shilling room of mine, where I had to flatten myself against the wall before I could take my clothes off unseen--or as I dined on sausage and mashed at my reeking "pull-up"--or as I roamed the pavements in search of the physical exhaustion that should bring sleep--would you suppose that in these places and living this life I could have heavenly hours? Ah, but I could, and had!... I don't want you to think I am sentimentalising about it. The public-house downstairs had knocked a good many ideas about the sanctity of our common humanity out of my head. I never, in my fourpenny dining-place, looked at the drayman or porter at the next table and wondered whether he also knew the heights and abysses I knew. Doubtless he had or had had his own, but all is _not_ comparative. There _are_ grades in heaven and hell. I knew I stood out, exceptional, destined, marked for signal honour or for signal dishonour. I had no desire to persuade anybody else of this. These things are beyond proof. Attempt to prove them and you but prove their opposites.

And so literally was this slender dark creature "my life," that often at the college itself my resolution all but failed me. More (but not much more) woman than child, she seemed at these times--what shall I say?--not a wonder shrunk, but a receptacle strangely slight and tender for the mighty things preparing for her. At such moments I found myself looking years ahead--seeing many things over and behind us, and myself, perhaps, turning my power elsewhere. And that moved me more than all the rest. For my strength was ever being used for her. Service of her was the law of it, as I now knew it had been its origin. I sometimes had ado not to sob, when watching her young head bent over the page of a text-book, images of great and brooding protection of enfolding and strong and jealous wakefulness, filled my breast as I looked. I felt in those moments that for every hair of her head I could have killed a man and felt no compunction afterwards.

Evie caused me far more anxiety than Archie did. At all times Archie's vanities, quite as amusing to watch as those of any young girl, would blind him to much that lay an inch or two beyond the end of his nose. He was, moreover, deep in his examination work, and I had no doubt that, once the examinations were over, he would indulge himself in a mild little "burst" and flatter his seraphic self he was rather a devil in his way. But she was more difficult. For one thing, hers was a richer nature. She had, or would presently have, far more to give; and already I saw that, as surely as Miss Windus was one of Life's takers, Evie Soames was one of Life's givers.

I watched--how I watched!--for the slightest of her unconscious betrayals; and, of course, by dint of watching I was able to find a thousand that presently vanished again. I drew trifling tremendous conclusions from the merest nothings. She could not make a gawky, captivating little movement but I would found something upon it, not a pretty coltish gesture but I had my inference to draw. The smile, perhaps, where lately the laugh would have been--the little check of recollection, even as she was perching herself with a tomboyish swing on the edge of a table, that she "was grown-up now"--slight little ceremoniousnesses, stilted little phrases and momentary forgettings again--I missed not one of these. My lovely, lovely flapper! Did you know that you were twenty different creatures in a week, each beyond words adorable until another swelling nodule yielded and allowed a peep of a yet inner tender and rosy heart?

Of course I see now that I was far too clever in all this. I had, in fact, taken the course that was least of all likely to tell me what I wanted to know. For, as a face seen daily shows no change and yet grows relentlessly older, so, because of my watching, she changed under my eyes and my eyes did not tell me she had changed. I have had in my time various things to say about "woman's intuition." I, like the rest of us, have set half of it down as guessing and the other half (the half that events falsify) as a convenient forgetfulness. Well, I hope I make amends when I admit now that in all this I owed my final enlightenment to a woman, and to the woman to whom I would least of all have been indebted--to Miss Windus.

It was on a Friday evening that this enlightenment came to me. Fridays were ever a pain to me, because of the three whole days that must elapse--five if she failed to appear on the Monday evening--before I could see Evie again. Believe me, the last minutes of those Friday evenings always cost me dearly in emotion; and in order that I might make the most of them I had some time before discontinued a former habit of mine--that of working in the senior students' classroom. By so doing I had forestalled any remarks on the fact that I was frequently to be found in the same room as Evie. And even then I knew I was lucky to escape Miss Levey's Hebrew intensiveness.

But on that Friday night I was restless. An absurd trifle had unsettled me (but I have told you how much such trifles meant to me)--nothing more than an alteration in Evie's way of arranging her hair. Until then it had been drawn back and massed in a thick little clump on her nape, showing beautifully the small round of her head; but now she had parted it (I did not think altogether more becomingly) in the middle, and had evidently been making desperate attempts to "wave" it. Certainly the change gave her at once a more adult air, which I supposed I should get used to, unless, as was likely, she changed it again in the following week. Her blouse also was new. It had a high lace collar up to her ears, and I didn't like it in the least. It was mere concealment, without concealment's charm.

I was restless. I had begun the evening by working, for once, in the senior classroom again; but presently, not happy where I was and not wishing to go straightway into the lecture-room where Evie sat, I had compromised by packing up my things and going into the room adjoining hers--the general room. The reference books were kept in the general room, and, presently, having need of one of these, I had crossed to the shelf and taken it down.

I ought to explain that these books were kept in three projecting bays, such as one sees in libraries, that stood out at right angles from the wall. Thus the books of each projecting wing faced both ways and between the bays there was just room enough for the short library ladder of three or four steps with the vertical staff to steady yourself by as you stood on it. As I could easily reach any book there without the ladder, I had passed the bay that contained it, and had taken up my place on the farther side of the wing nearest the window, where I stood with the open book in my hand. I forget what the book was.

As I stood I heard Miss Windus and Miss Causton come into the adjoining compartment.

I had no great interest in either of these women--I may say none, since I could not see Miss Causton's fluent hand; so, merely noting their arrival, I was continuing my reading when suddenly I heard the name of Evie Soames. It was Miss Windus who was speaking.

"... Oh, I suppose so; in her way, of course--if that's all men want!" she was saying. "Don't you think?" This with a little acidulous rising inflection.

Then I heard Miss Causton's indolent voice in reply. From the way in which she spoke I fancied she was eating sweets. It had lately struck me that she ate more sweets than both the other girls together, and if it wasn't sweets it was something else.

"Don't ask _me_, my dear," she drawled. "_I_ don't know what the creatures want."

"Of course not. They do seem to want such--odd--things. The way I'm looked at sometimes--I declare it makes me feel perfectly ashamed!" said Miss Windus. Why she said it I don't know. It was the purest hypocrisy, and it was not likely to impose on Miss Causton, who had a nonchalant, still humour of her own.... But on second thoughts I don't know. I was not always sure, afterwards, when I got to know Miss Windus better, that she didn't really labour under some such delusion as this.

"Do they?" Miss Causton asked lazily. "They don't worry me much. So long ago since I've seen one that I've nearly forgotten."

There was a short pause, then:

"Really, they stare so," Miss Windus continued, "look one so out of countenance--one really doesn't know which way to turn!"

"No?" came Miss Causton's ironical dawdle. "Oh ... with a chance, my dear ... _I_ should!" ... I suppose she smiled as she said it. While appearing to lay herself perfectly open she had far more to hide than Miss Windus had.

Miss Windus was shocked.

"You _dreadful_ girl!... But really Louie, you must have noticed it. Why, you can see it the moment she comes into the room!"

"Really?" came the other detached voice. "How quaint!... Who do you think she's after? Not the Baboon?..."

I imagined the chuckle I didn't hear. I took it that the Baboon was myself.

"Mandrill, my dear," Miss Windus corrected. "You really must take a memory powder!..."

"Oh, I call it baboon," Miss Causton remarked with indifference. Then she laughed.... "How ridiculous you are! He's as big as a man ought to be anyway----"

"Oh, quite!"

"----and I declare you can look at him till he's quite good-looking!"

"Oh!..." (I could almost see Miss Windus' quizzical eyes.)

"Really, you are absurd!..."

There was another short silence.

"And by the way," Miss Windus next said, "_he's_ been rather--different somehow--lately, don't you think?"

Sweets crunched for a moment, then:

"Different?... Do you mean _he's_ been looking at you in that--ahem!--dreadful way?"

"What, _that_ creature!..."

"Beg yours, dear----"

"_I_ should think so!... But I fancied he'd been somehow--not quite the same----"

"Well, anything for a change, as the song says. Myself, if I found I couldn't get along without 'em, I should prefer----"

But a "Sssh!" interrupted Miss Causton. Somebody had come into the farther bay, and the rest for a time was whispering.

When next the conversation became audible its tenor did not seem to have changed.

"Scented soap in a little celluloid box, too!" Miss Windus admired.

"One must keep oneself clean," Miss Causton threw off. "Have some of this, dear. I simply had to have some chocolate nougat to-night!..."

There was a rustling of tissue paper.

"Well, it's a sign, and so's her hair-waving and polishing her nails and that lace yoke," Miss Windus resumed.

"Oh yes, the pneumonia blouse----"

"_And_ her heels--_and_ a scent-sachet!..."

You see that I was quite deliberately listening. I am not putting on any airs about it. I might have been Polwhele. I wanted to know, so I listened. I did more than listen too. I watched. I knew that the shelves were only half full on the other side; only a screen of stout wire separated the books facing one way from those facing the other; and by pulling out a book or two on my side I should probably find a peephole.... Very softly I pulled three or four out, found my opening and looked. Miss Causton appeared to be standing with her back towards me; I couldn't see her; but I could see Miss Windus, sitting on the library ladder holding its short staff, with her plaid skirt pulled tightly about one carrot-shaped thigh.

They began to talk again.

"And another thing that makes me _quite_ sure, dear! She's going to young Merridew's next week-end!"

"Oh!..."

"Don't be absurd. You know what I mean. To his parents', of course; they live in Guildford.... Not that _she_ told me, oh no! Not her ladyship!"

"Who did, then?"

"Not her, though I gave her _every_ chance! Six months ago she'd have told me like a shot, but we're getting so blessed artful these days!... He told me."

"Then it doesn't look as if it _was_ the Baboon?"

"Oh, I daresay she'll leave you your Baboon if you want him."

"Thanks. I think I should know which way to turn in _that_ case," Miss Causton replied evenly. "Coming?"

And they left the bay together.

It was by this admirable piece of Rixon Tebb & Masters' work that I learned what, it appeared, I had been watching too closely to see.

VI

I had intended in any case to spend the remainder of that evening with Archie Merridew. Mingled with my restlessness there had been a tremulous sensitiveness that had culminated half-an-hour before in a fit of satanic pride. Lately (I had decided) it had come to be taken rather too much as a matter of course that our frequent adjournments after the evening class should be always to his quarters and never, or hardly ever, to mine. I had quite enough to bear without further gratuitous rubs of that kind, and I had resolved that I would make myself his host that evening though he had lived in a mansion and I in a sty.

But after what I had so altogether discreditably overheard now I had fifty other reasons for wishing him to come along with me. Almost every sentence that had been spoken on the other side of that bay of books had contained a reason. But I realised that before I could trust myself to face him I must swallow the anger that crowded thickly into my throat. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose by letting him see my rage. So I walked back into the empty senior classroom, there to remain until I should have got the worst of it over.

By half-past nine I had got myself in hand. I gathered my work together. Students were coming to the row of washbowls in the small compartment at the end of the senior classroom to wash their hands, and Evie gave me the smile that was to be my nourishment for three whole days as she passed with her towel and the cake of soap in the new celluloid box. Archie had been working all the evening in the typewriting-room; now was my chance, before he could make (supposing him to want to make) any appointment with her, to secure this myself, and I hurried for my hat and coat and sought him.

"Ready?" I said.

"Right-oh; just a minute," he replied. "I told 'em to keep my fire in--I'm going to swot like blazes to-night."

"Oh no--you're coming along with me this time," I laughed. "I shall be ashamed to show my face at your place much oftener ... unless," I added lest he should shake me off, "you love me merely for what I have----"

He laughed too. He was at the young and squab-like stage that takes a pride in scorning appearances, and even finds the heart more rather than less honest when the waistcoat over it is shabby. He accepted with quite a good grace, got his hat and coat, and we went out together, I giving Miss Windus an unimpeachable "Good-night" as I passed her, hardly a yard from the spot where I had peeped on her less than an hour before.

The electrograph opposite my abode was an advertisement of "_Sarcey's Fluid_," some sort of a disinfectant; and as we approached it Archie looked up.

"Phew!... Needs it rather, to-night, doesn't it?" he laughed.

It did not seem to me to "need it" quite so badly that evening as it had on some other evenings--warm summer evenings, for example--I had known. December had come in rawly, and the chestnut stoves and baked-potato engine were out. The poorer streets have no pleasanter smell than that of baked potatoes, broken up, sprinkled with salt from the big tin caster, and closed together again like a South Sea face with a mealy smiling mouth, and I had slipped a couple of these into my pocket for our supper. I suppose Archie meant the fried fish papers in the gutters and (as we entered by my side door) the acrid smell of the public-house; but it was part of my fiendish pride to rub those things in a little that evening, and I made light of them as we mounted the stairs.

"Oh, you're pampered, Master Archie," said I. "I had thought of asking you round to supper next Saturday evening--not to-morrow, a week to-morrow--but I think I shall save my hospitality."

You see what I was already angling for. Well, I caught my fish. Of course he couldn't take Evie down to his folks at Guildford without my knowing of it, but I wanted to see the fashion in which he would make his avowal. We had left the carpeted corner of the stairs that the great ornamental public-house lamp illuminated brightly and were standing on the bare landing outside my room. He answered without an instant's hesitation.

"Afraid you'll have to, Jeff--twice over," he replied. "I've got to go down home that week-end; beastly nuisance! I was going with some fellows over to Richmond--stag-party; but the mater writes that she's asked Miss Soames, so I suppose I shall have to be there to help out--confound it!"

I opened my door and let him into the red and green.

"Oh?" I remarked casually. "Nice change for you. You'll be all the fitter for the exams. Don't tell _me_ about your stag-parties though. I know 'em; you'd take jolly good care not to pick the place with the plainest waitresses for tea, what? _I_ know you!... But if I were you I'd go steady for a week or two, my boy, that Method paper'll be harder than you think, I warn you!"

"I'm watching it!" he replied cheerfully. "By Jove! Jeff, I'd forgotten what a noisy pitch this of yours is! What on earth makes you stay here?"

"Oh, I don't know," I replied carelessly, applying a match to the wick of my lamp and replacing the chimney. "As I say, you're pampered. The place is all right. I don't do much except sleep here. It's a bit cold, though. I'd keep my coat on if I were you----"

"Wouldn't be much sleep for me here," he remarked, sitting on the edge of my bed. "I should want a good stiff drink before I slept much in this racket!"

As I placed the lamp globe on its brass ring I glanced covertly at him. It was a green interval, and his face looked as if he stood by a chemist's window near the big pear-shaped green globe, while his waistcoat was turned to a black purple, with one brass button gleaming green as a cat's eye. Then the red came again, and the lamp flame crept up. I went to the little cupboard where I kept my few cups and saucers and plates. I filled my kettle at the tap on the landing, put it on the half-crown oil-stove, and began to prepare our feast.

In a quarter of an hour it was ready--tea, the baked potatoes, and a wedge of butter apiece. We ate it, he sitting on my bed, I in my sagging and string-mended old wicker chair. I saw quite plainly that already he wanted to be off, and would stay no longer than the barest decency demanded; but he had got to eat that pauper's meal before I let him go, and there were my forty-nine other reasons for having got him up there.

One of these other reasons had, during the last hour, taken complete shape in my mind. Its consequences would have been impossible to foresee, but as far as it yet went, I thought it crafty enough. I filched another look at him; he was burning the roof of his mouth with hot potato as he lolled against my bed foot; and I judged it time to put my plan into execution.

I pushed my own plate away and sank back into my lifeless old wicker chair. He had turned his coat collar up by this time. My plan kept me warm.

"You're a lucky beggar, you know, Archie," I sighed heavily.

He had moved, to set down his cup of untasted tea on the floor. He looked up.

"How?" he asked.

I settled myself farther back.

"How!" I repeated almost vindictively. "Don't you call it lucky having a house and people and so on?"

"Oh! Everybody has----" he began, but corrected himself. "I mean, I thought you meant some special luck!"

"Oh no--just that," I murmured. "Having a place to ask people down to when you want--that's all."

He seemed surprised. "Do you mean Miss Soames?" he said.

"Miss----?" I shook my head absently. "Oh no, I wasn't thinking of Miss Soames--I was thinking of something quite different."

He meditated for a moment.

"You _have_ seemed a bit different lately.... What's up?" he demanded, looking squarely at me.

My plan, to which his last words gave a new and unexpected fillip, was briefly this:

When, over the case of reference books, I had heard Miss Windus make the very remark he also had just made--namely, that I had been "different"--I had had a swift access of alarm. In what particular I had betrayed myself I didn't know, but I realised very clearly, and doubly clearly now that the same remark had dropped from Archie himself, that love and a light cannot be hid, and that if my extreme former care had not secured me from remark no care I was likely to be able to take for the future would do so. I had laid myself open, and should do so again. How was I to cover myself?

I thought I saw my way. I invite you to consider that way.

Were I to give it out to Archie--or rather, not so much to give it out as allow a surmise to dawn on him--that my heart was already pre-engaged in some carefully unspecified quarter or other, not only would this "difference," both he and Miss Windus had remarked on, be admitted and accounted for, but I should at one stroke set myself free from a hundred other trammels of gossip, past, present and to come. After that avowal nothing I did would be unaccountable. I should have a definite place in the general sex-understanding. I should be classed, out of the running, filed and docketed, totally uninteresting to either Miss Windus or Miss Causton and rid of the attentions of Miss Levey.

And I should also--my heart had thrilled suddenly and poignantly as I thought of this--I should also be admitted at once to privileges. I should have my share in such freedoms and exemptions as the married man knows fully and the attached bachelor at least to a probationary extent. This state of things does by tacit acknowledgment exist. The man who can say all to one woman can say more than other men to all women. And the shining immunity I now saw before me would even include what so far I had had to deny myself--conversation, thus safeguarded, with Evie herself.

"By heaven!" my heart now cried within me, "I will do it!"

And instantly a perfect seething of the cautions and reserves with which I must do it sprang up in my brain.

But here was Archie patiently waiting for me to speak.

"What's up? What the dickens are you talking about?" he asked once more.

I let my head drop, as a man might who discovers he has said too much. "Oh, nothing," I replied.

Archie was just as sharp as--neither more nor less than--I wished him to be.

"A lot of fuss about nothing--if it's really nothing," he said suspiciously.

The next moment he had looked hard into my face, taken a long breath, and, suddenly bringing his hand down on his thigh, broken into loud laughter.

"By Jove! Jeff--I really believe--let's have a look at you--by Jove! I really do--_I believe you're in love_! What a----How ripping, I mean! Best congratulations, old chap--my turn this time--ha ha ha ha!"

I drew myself heavily up. The kind of thing I was doing has to be done rather carefully. "Look here, Archie--" I began, trembling between the wrath I felt and the not-too-much wrath I must appear to display; but he interrupted me:

"Well, that's a knock-out! Who'd have dreamed----"

"Why not?" I demanded sharply.

"Oh, I didn't mean that!" he made such haste to say that it was plain as a pikestaff that he had meant precisely "that."

"I only meant, how surprising--how unexpected. I mean----"

I frowned. "_Should_ you find it so--if it _were_ so?"

"Should!" he said, puzzled. "... Isn't it so, Jeff?"

"No," I replied; but a "No" that so exquisitely contradicted itself that I gave myself nothing less than admiration for the performance.

"No?" he echoed. "You're lying, Jeff--you _are_!" he broke out triumphantly. "I can tell by the way you say it! So _that's_ it! Dashed if I didn't think there was something!... Who is she, Jeff?"

But that, as you may suppose, it was no part of my plan to tell.

Neither was it part of that plan to enjoin either secrecy or the other thing upon him. That, I thought grimly, might quite safely be left to take care of itself. "Mandrill, my dear; you really must take a memory powder!..." I seemed to hear Miss Windus' voice again over the bookshelves. Oh yes, if he would give currency to that Zoo nonsense he could be trusted not to keep the richer joke, of Jeffries in love, to himself!

For that he and not Evie had been responsible for this pleasantry at the expense of my appearance I had concluded by a much sounder process of observation and reasoning than that my love-lorn state predisposed me entirely in her favour. My watching, a failure in other respects, had at least succeeded in this respect. And that I had found had not been without its barb for me. You may remember my former pathetic gratitude that, while others singled me out for marked treatment, she alone had not, in the trifling forms and observances that are the gracious outside of intercourse as distinct from its inner truth, differentiated me from the rest of the world. Well, I had made a guess at the reason for that. It was, in a word, her upbringing. The aunt with whom she lived in Woburn Place had taught her to "behave nicely," and so on. I could see that education. Such maxims as that one must not "judge by appearances," that "handsome is that handsome does," and, generally speaking, the unexceptional tradition that the "less fortunately circumstanced" have special claims on superior gentleness and pity, form almost the whole of it. I, it appeared, was one of these "less fortunately circumstanced".... Of course nobody was to blame. By-and-by the amiable aunt would probably go a little further, and teach her that it is not enough that these unimpeachable precepts should be merely observed, but that the thought behind them must be concealed as well. When you treat a poor devil just as if he was anybody else you must not let it be seen that you do so from perception that he is not.... Anyway, there it was, and it rather took the shine out of that "good-night, Mr Jeffries" that had sent me off happy to Archie's rooms on the evening when I had been so startlingly shaken out of my fool's paradise.

Thus I was persuaded, and as it turned out quite rightly, that it had been young Merridew, and not she, who had allowed his tongue this licence both on Weston's physical characteristics and my own.

His cup of tea was still on the floor, and by this time was cold. He hadn't tasted it, and, his renewed congratulations on what he supposed to be my blissful state of mind over, was once more fidgeting to be off. But it was quite at my own pleasure whether I released him or not; I had the hateful advantage of my baked potatoes and my poverty; and though he was getting colder moment by moment, being less accustomed to the lack of a fire than I, I did not spare him.

"Yes," I remarked musingly by-and-by, as if I had been thinking over a former remark, "I'd take that Method paper quite seriously if I were you. Save up your little fling till that's over. Stag-parties and work don't go together, my son."

He had a little gleam of perspicacity. "What little fling?" he asked. "Who said I was going to have one?"

("Carefully, Jeffries," I cautioned myself.) Aloud I said cheerfully, "My mistake, Archie--I'm out of the running in these things--I'm rather a Puritan by necessity, you see. Perhaps I was taking it rather for granted----"

He chuckled. "A Puritan by necessity! A Puritan by Miss Whatever-her-name-is, more like! Do at least tell us if it's anybody we know, Jeff!"

But I ignored the latter part of his remark. "Well done, Archie," I applauded. "I'm glad you see that when a man's got one woman he's no need for all the others. Stick to that and you're all right."

And that clinched it. "Well, you've got the pull over me there," he said.

I made no reply.

You need not conclude, unless you wish, that I wanted to start him straight away to the devil. I couldn't have ensured his arrival at that destination if I had. But I was prepared to go half way with him if by so doing I could keep him from getting into paradise by the means I had reserved for myself. I was doing him no conspicuous harm. He would have to rub shoulders with the world before long--was already doing so; and I said no more to him--nay, I said far less--than he would have picked up for himself in almost any gathering of young men of his own age that he was likely to find himself among.... So presently, when after (how shall I put it?)--after having tapped it home that there _was_ the one woman and also the others, I returned to the examination in Method again, I was talking as easily as if, his betrayals to Miss Windus notwithstanding, we had been the best friends in the world.

"By the way, that's another thing you're lucky in, my boy," I said. "The exam's in the daytime. I suppose that doesn't convey anything to you."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it means something to me. I shall have to get a day off."

"Well?" he inquired.

"Well--it doesn't by any means follow that I shall get it."

He stared. "You don't mean to say they'd be such skunks as not to let you off for a day!" he exclaimed.

I laughed. "Perhaps they won't be such skunks," I remarked.

"Oh!" he cried, outraged. "They _couldn't_!"

He was as ignorant about Rixon Tebb & Masters as he was about everything else in life.

Presently, with a "Brrr!" and a shiver, he got off my bed.

"Well, I'm off," he said. "I didn't intend to come round, and I'm going back to swot."

I heaved myself up from my chair. "Must you? Well, wait a moment--I'll come down with you----"

Before I turned down my lamp, filling the room with the red and green again, I noticed his untouched cup of tea on the floor. I made no remark on it, but as I preceded him down the narrow stairs I found myself suddenly filled with a curiosity as to whether I guessed rightly what was passing in his mind. I had made my shot, and was as interested to know whether it was a true one as if I had had a bet on it.

Where the great public-house lamp shone brightly through the landing window the stairs branched, one flight descending to the side door by which we had entered and the other leading to the back bar of the public-house. It was as we reached this bifurcation that I found I had guessed rightly.

"I say," he said, "I'm beastly cold! Come this way and have a drink!"

I shook my head.

"Not here," I said. "Not on my own premises, so to speak. If you don't mind my having something thin I'll come over the way with you."

"Anywhere," he said, with another shiver.

There was another public-house just beyond the _Sarcey's Fluid_ advertisement. We crossed and entered it.

"Rum--hot!" he called familiarly, peering under the frame of pivoted glass panes and flipping on the counter with a florin to attract the barmaid's attention. "Come along, Flossie--hurry up!... What's your poison, Jeff?"

He had his rum hot; but I drank nothing stronger than peppermint.

VII

His incredible gaucheries apart, I had no reason for hating him. One does not hate a youngster seven years one's junior merely because he is a mass of inexperience and self-sufficiency. Once again my hate was really a hatred of the whole dreary circumstances of my life, and, when I saw this concentrating stormily over young Merridew's head, I made attempt after attempt to divert it. I swear to you I made these attempts. I made them first of all to save him from a contest so unequal as one with my wrath must be; and if I made them later so that I myself should not be merely the slave of that wrath, I still made them. And all the time, as I say, so long as he did not stand in my way, it was a matter of indifference to me whether he took the upward path or that which led downhill to perdition.

Unfortunately I was in love, and no man in love can stand by the rules that he knows ought to govern his conduct. Those jealousies I have spoken of as torturing me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' shook me in spite of myself. When I felt their approach I took care to give young Merridew a wide berth; and I confess that in sometimes letting these fits have their way with me I found an abominable ease. Away from him, my heart was filled with rage and revilings; but these very outbreaks enabled me at other times to meet him with a smile on my lips and a welcome in my eyes. Once I had got rid of the over-plus of my rage I could almost have persuaded myself of my affection for him.

So I alternated, as the red and green of my apartment alternated; and perhaps the red seemed redder and the green greener by the mere force of the contrast. I continued to walk home frequently with him after the class, to share his supper frequently, and to be obliged to him for my necessary bath.

I very soon learned that in the matter of my reputed being in love he had done exactly what I had intended he should do--had whispered the news about the college. It required no further eavesdropping to tell me that; I felt it in the altered air. I saw the knowledge peering through the little scalene triangles of Miss Windus' eyes, saw it in the looks of sleepy and amused curiosity with which Miss Causton favoured me. The latter lady, indeed, sometimes positively alarmed me, for the glances I suffered when I chanced to enter a room in which she was at work held incalculable things, and I no longer dared to look at her own amused and supercilious eyes, her fascinating hands, or that foot beneath the hem of her dress, fine and slender as a violin. And with the least encouragement Miss Windus would, I knew, have sought my company, and, lacking an admirer of her own, would have eased her breast to somebody else's of all the things about love at large that she ached to say to somebody. I wondered, seeing them both, whether there was no middle way with women. The whole sex seemed to be divided into creatures (or rather a creature, for I set Evie apart) to be enskied by men, and the other kind, that a man might fly as he would fly a wild animal. And I am not sure even now that when these two things are found in one and the same woman they ever really shake down together. They seem to go on existing, independently, unreconciled, side by side.

But Miss Levey was far worse. She always seemed to me to crave information, useful or useless, from a mere acquisitiveness; and I may say now that it was she who, later, first roused in me the uneasy suspicion that unless I was exceedingly careful I should find that I had undertaken more than I could well manage. She began all at once to show quite a liking for my company. She mislaid books in the room where I sat, got into difficulties with copying presses when I was about, and glanced up at open or closed windows too high for her reach, as if she felt a draught or the lack of air, it didn't matter which, and must suffer until somebody came to her help. All this had its rise in the idlest curiosity, unless, as I sometimes suspected, she had made a bet that she would get out of me who this imaginary _fiancée_ of mine was, and was determined to win it. One day as I saw her struggling with the blind cords in one of the window bays, and advanced to her assistance, she relinquished the cords, and then, as if to apologise for the trouble she was causing me, said, "Oh, thank you so much--you see I'm going to a dance to-night, and have a slight cold already.... You don't go to dances, do you, Mr Jeffries?" I answered that I did not, whereupon she said gaily, "Oh, you must learn! I'm sure you could find _some_body who would teach you! Then you and your partner could join our set--such fun!"

And another time she actually came to me with tickets for one of her "hops," and pointed out to me that I should be saving a shilling by taking both a pink ticket as well as a blue one.

But while these were the results of my whispered false intelligence on Miss Windus and Miss Causton and Miss Levey, the results on Evie Soames were both foreseen and unforeseen. I had foreseen that it would give me a new liberty with her; but I had not foreseen that she, and not I, would be the first to take advantage of that liberty. It came to me entirely as a surprise that she should see no reason why, if my heart was engaged, she should not speak of it as a matter of course to myself.

This, to my great confusion, she did.

It was in the small back room that we called the library, among the book-shelves and glass-cases of mimeographs and gelatine copiers and patent tills, that she did so. I had seen her talking to Weston in the empty lecture-room as I had passed through to restore a book to its place--a new translation of "Schmoller on the Mercantile System," I remember it was--and she had turned as I had passed. I think she had been a little nervous about the pretty little exhibition she intended. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that she had actually practised the words she was going to use, and I am quite sure she meant to go through it creditably. My lady was even then looking forward to the time when, on a small scale or a large one, she would have to do these things. So she followed me into the library, and, with one slender hand on the iron ball-arm of the copying press under the gas said her little piece.

"Oh, Mr Jeffries!... I hear I have to congratulate you!"

For a moment I did not take her meaning. Then it dawned on me, and I felt a quick constriction of my heart that was both bliss and pain.

"Oh?... On--on what?" I asked. I couldn't help stammering a little over it.

She wore a brown cloth tailor-made costume and a thick knitted cap of white wool; and the shadow of this cap over her large eyes was not so deep but that I saw the almost reproachful look in them. It was almost as if she echoed: "'On what?' Can such a wonderful thing have happened to you and you ask 'On what?'"

"On this we hear of your engagement," she replied, looking down at her toes. "It's--it's true, isn't it?"

For the second time I felt my facile invention sitting somewhat less easily on me. I stammered again, while she, I am quite sure, misattributed my embarrassment.

"Who told you that?"

At that she was sweetly arch.

"Oh, a little bird, Mr Jeffries! Don't tell me it isn't true--it would be almost--almost like bad luck----"

"Bad luck?" I repeated foolishly.

"I mean, like wearing your wedding dress before the day, or something like that--congratulating you too soon, I mean----"

By this time I had collected my thoughts. "It isn't true," I said.

Instantly her face fell adorably. In its expression I fancied I detected both indignation against her misinformant and mortification that her dear little attempt at social competence had failed.

"Oh!... I'm _so_ sorry!" she murmured, all dejection and shame and rich colour. "Please forgive me!"

"It isn't true," I said, "that--that I am actually engaged to be married."

Like a flash she was all eagerness again. She had a book in her hand, not a college text-book but a novelette; and probably the whole of the novelette was in her glad change of tone. I was not exactly engaged to be married, but I _was_ in love, and I daresay her brain was already a jumble of surmises about obstinate parents, secret wills, _marriages de convenance_, and true and severed young hearts.

"Oh!" she said again. "I'm so--I mean I hope I shall soon be able to--I mean I hope I'm not rude if I----" She floundered, already out of her depth.

"Not at all," I said gravely. "I only said I was not formally engaged. There are--other reasons for congratulation after all----"

"Oh, then I _do_!" she cried impulsively, with a grateful look that I had helped her out. "I'm _so_ glad!"

Then, her ordeal over, she glanced towards the door.

But a daring impulse seized me. This was on a Friday night, and I knew that on the morrow she was going to Guildford.

"I see you're just leaving," I said. "Would it annoy you if I were to walk a little way with you?"

Again the code of her upbringing banished her momentary hesitation.

"Unless," I said, "you have already----"

"Oh no!" she said, with quick frankness. "I only meant that I nearly always go alone, or else with Miss Windus."

"I'm sure Miss Windus can spare you for once. One doesn't get congratulated like this every day," I pressed.

She laughed merrily. "Some of us don't get it at all," she said. "With pleasure, Mr Jeffries."

I slapped Schmoller back into his place on the shelf, and went off, drunk with bliss, to get my hat and coat.

That night I walked with Evie for the first time to Woburn Place. Never had the Bloomsbury streets seemed so short, never the east side of the British Museum so few paces in length. I remember very little of what we talked about, I know she spoke of her visit to Guildford. The invitation, she gave me to understand, was really to her aunt, and it was to the subject of her aunt that she quickly returned when I insinuated a mention of Archie's name. I insinuated it again a minute later, but after that, noticing the way in which she came back to the aunt again, I forbore.

"But I'm afraid we can't ask the Merridews back, as we ought," she said, once more socially prescient. "We only have rooms in Woburn Place, you see, and you can't very well ask people all that way just to rooms, can you?"

"No," I replied briefly. I was thinking of my own late hospitality to Archie.

"We used to have a house, of course, before uncle died, and you know how poky rooms seem after that."

"Yes," I replied, compressing my lips.

And so we chatted. I forget what our other subjects were. I left her, with our first hand-shake, at her door.

What that week-end was to me I will not attempt to tell you. I did not belong to this earth at all. The fact that actually, in her person, she was enjoying herself in Archie's company at Guildford was nothing to me; the fact that every fibre of me was rapturously tremulous at the thought of her was everything. I triumphed as if I already had her yielding in my arms. Archie?... In my possession I laughed. I even felt kindly to Archie--felt towards him that it would give me pleasure to have him, by-and-by, a quite frequent visitor at my house--our house.... I spread the mantle of my exaltation over the draymen and porters of the place where I dined. Their heavens were not mine, but if a man is full he is full, and I allowed them sanctities of their own. My heart was soft and generous to them. For the first time in my life I knew what folk mean when they say they love all the world.

The sweet influence had not quite left me when on Monday night I went to the college to see her again.

She did not appear that night. Neither did he.

It was Wednesday before I saw her again.

I do not know what damnable difference in me that absence of the pair of them for a single evening made. It came over me so suddenly that I was in its clutches before I was aware. It was a significant transformation. Let me relate it.

I knocked at the brass knocker of Archie's ivy-green door an hour before the class on the Tuesday night, and found that he intended to work at home that evening. (I only learned this, however, some minutes later.) I had had a double reason for calling on him at that hour, and the blood comes hot again in my cheeks as I recall my second reason. I had recently bought a new suit of clothes, not in Lamb's Conduit Street, but made, though cheaply enough, to measure; and though it was only the beginning of the week one of the payments for this suit had already depleted my pocket almost to the last penny. Since breakfast that day I had not eaten. But I knew the hour at which Archie dined.

So nicely had I hit the moment for my self-invitation that I actually followed his hot dinner half-way up the stairs. It was only on the first landing that the servant stood aside with the tray to allow me to precede her. I knocked at his door and entered, leaving the door open for the dinner of which I intended to partake to follow.

He had brought a fowl back with him from Guildford, with one or two other motherly gifts, and I smelt the white sauce even before Jane put the tray down on a side table. Archie was in his brown dressing-gown, standing before his fire. He had taken the green shade from his lamp, and his low-ceilinged roof-chamber looked exceedingly ruddy and comfortable and home-like.

"Hallo! Good man!" he cried. "You're just in time--I was just funking carving--you'd better be getting your hand in for when you're a family man!... Bring another plate, Jane.... Well, how's things?"

It was then that the thing happened that still has power to bring the blood to my cheeks. It was exquisitely cruel in the moment of its coming.

"Oh, so-so," I replied carelessly.... "But I've just this minute swallowed my dinner, thanks. You go ahead. I'll watch you."

"Oh, rubbish!" he replied, in a tone that hardened me. "I'll lay you haven't had so much but you can pick a bit of Surrey fowl."

I damned the thickness of his hide, but swallowed my choler.

"Really, thanks," I said, turning away to look at a print on the wall that I had seen a hundred times before.

Jane hesitated. It was a long way up from the kitchen, and the old bell-pull of red rope by his fireplace didn't always ring. "Shall I bring the other plate, Mr Merridew?" she asked.

"Yes--bring it--he'll change his mind!"

But in my hellish pride I had now no intention whatever of changing my mind. Twice again he pressed me, and twice I declined, the second time curtly; and he fell to himself, while I sat in a chair and watched him.

"Oh, by the way," he said suddenly, with his mouth full of food, "I'm going to work here to-night.... Sure you won't have some pudding?"

I rose. "Oh, well, if you're not coming I'll sheer off; why didn't you say so? Enjoy your week-end?"

"Oh, first rate. But, dash it all, don't be in such a hurry--you're far too early yet."

"Oh, I've just remembered something," I said, "See you again soon."

And I waved my hand and left.

I did not go to the class either that night. I was raging again, and trying to protect that young fool from the injury of my savage thoughts. I failed completely. Not even the thought that my passionate resentment was a force to be confined as it were in a boiler, and only to be allowed to escape by the way that would prove effective, restrained me from clenching my fists and gritting my teeth as I recalled the image of his pretty and ignorant and conceited face; and I am afraid I "let go" utterly. I walked by way of Chancery Lane and Bouverie Street to the Embankment; I crossed Blackfriars Bridge, and after that I don't quite know where I went, trying to forget my hunger, and trying to shake off my hideous grudge against the world that threatened to crash over the head of the egotistical whipper-snapper I had left.

I have related this at some length because it was the first time, but not the last, that that devil of sensitiveness took me in quite that way.

VIII

I had not exaggerated when I told Archie Merridew that I might find some difficulty in obtaining from Rixon Tebb & Masters' leave of absence for the day of the Method examination. That examination was fixed for a Friday, a fortnight and some days after my refusal to set fork into that fragrantly steaming Surrey fowl of Archie Merridew's, and this falling on a Friday added to my difficulties.

Or rather I should say that it added to Polwhele's difficulties, for it was to Polwhele I looked once more to find a way out for me. For Friday was a wage-day, and since I must have my eighteen shillings in order to live, a mere covering of my absence would not suffice. The cashier would have to be taken into the arrangement.

But Polwhele had by now to some extent got over his dread, if not over his hatred, of me. When I put the matter to him he refused. This was in the street, during the luncheon hour. The louse refused to help me, and turned away.

Exactly fifteen minutes later I had bearded the cashier himself, catching him at the door as he was returning from his meal.

At first he looked at me as much as to say, "Did _I_ speak to _you"_? Then, finding it impossible to pretend he didn't know who I was, he said, "What is it?"

I told him what I wanted, concealing only my reason for wanting it; and, after his first astonishment that I had taken the absolutely unprecedented course of addressing a request otherwise than through the usual channel, I found him not unmanageable. As a matter of fact, things were slack, and there was only one kind of labour that Rixon Tebb & Masters' would have preferred to that it had from the agency at eighteen shillings a week--namely, a "floating margin" waiting on the pavement to be taken on for an hour or two as it might be required. Gayns saw a chance of saving a day.

"You don't expect to be paid for that day, do you?" he said.

"No," I replied.

He thought for a moment. "All right," he said. "You can come for your fifteen shillings on Thursday night."

And Polwhele set another mark against me, that I had approached a superior over his head.

As I entered the Business College at half-past ten on the morning of the examination it suddenly struck me that I had never been inside the place in the daytime before. By gaslight it was, as I have said, dingy enough, but by daylight it was shabby in the extreme. I walked round the rooms, noticing for the first time that the shorthand and typewriting rooms, which looked on the side street to the east of the block, were by far the lightest rooms on our top floor, and that the library in which I had received Evie's congratulations was little more than a thick twilight, which the cleaning of the single grimy back window that looked out over yards and chimney-pots would probably not greatly have improved. The room adjoining that, the old ledger-room, was not, except for the small high square of glass that gave on the head of the stairs, lighted at all.

They had made, too, quite extensive arrangements for the occasion itself. We had been warned that we should not be allowed to leave the premises until the examination was over, and as far as possible separate spaces had been provided for each of the twenty-five candidates--compartments of screens hired for the day from some furnisher or shop-fitter, and open at the ends to the gaze of the half-dozen perambulating guardians of the probity of examinations who looked as if they too had been had in for the day on the same terms as the screens. The contrast between the new fittings and the old wallpapers and chandeliers struck me. And I remembered that even now, when I had been debited my three shillings to be present, I did not see the place in its normal daytime aspect at all.

The papers were to be distributed at eleven, and at a few minutes before that hour we were all assembled. A man called Mackie and myself were the only two candidates for the Honours paper, and he and I were kept well apart--I told off to a seat in the middle of the lecture-room, he isolated in the typewriting-room. Evie, timorous about her Elementary, was separated from Archie Merridew (who occupied the box between Miss Windus and a pale student, Richardson) by the whole length of the general room. We took our places; in all the rooms at once voices were heard reading some cautionary form or other (my policeman gave me the most mistrustful of glances as he pronounced the words "expelled from the examination-room and your paper cancelled"); the papers were distributed on the stroke of eleven, and the examination began.

I need not trouble you with what it was all about. The importance of that day to me was quite unconnected with the paper on Method. I ought, however, to say that the paper was in reality two papers, the first in Theory and the second in Practice, with the interval for lunch dividing the two. I mention this only to explain how it was we came to be all talking together when, a little after half-past one, our first papers had been collected and we were free to unsnap our satchels or untie our parcels of lunch.

Despite my reduced income that week I had provided myself with a sumptuous lunch--two kinds of sausage from a _delicatessen_ shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a paper of potato salad, a roll, butter, some sort of chocolate _baba_ or _moka_, and a bottle of Schweppes' dry ginger ale. That lunch had cost me nearly three shillings--but I intended to eat only a third of it. The rest was to be my chief sustenance during the two following days. I was not among my porters and drivers now--oh no! I was cutting quite a dash. Archie, passing with Miss Windus as I opened my black satchel, did not forbear to remark, "By Jove! doesn't Jeffries do himself well, what?" and it had been in order that I might be assumed to "do" myself equally well every day of my life that I had made my little display. I ate my exact third in the same compartment I had written my examination paper in, and then, closing my bag on the precious remainder, put it under the seat and mingled with the others.

By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic songs at "smokers," and a frequent looker-in at the shilling dances at the Holburn Town Hall after class. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pass that he was cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his mind.

"It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!" he exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of modern examinations is true). "Kitty Windus says she'll eat her mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos."

I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of Mackie's "Flor" reached her, and then a little way back again as she caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper again.

"All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!" he said, with regret for the time he had lost. "I wouldn't have dropped out of the billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular John Roberts--in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier when teacher says we can go."

And he ran on, with dull facetiousness.

But suddenly he stopped his rapid flow. He made a slight movement with his finger, and stood listening. I heard nothing except the voices lower down the stairs and the general hum in the room we had just left. But Mackie did.

"Hear that?" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Sssh!..."

I told you how the wooden partition at the head of the stairs, that with the small window high up, separated the landing on which we stood from the old ledger-room. The window was worked with cords on a horizontal pivot, and was swung partly open. Whether Mackie heard whatever he did hear through this window or through the boards themselves I do not know, but a smile came over his face.

"It's that young devil," he whispered.

"Who?"

"Why, young Merridew. He's in there with somebody...."

I invite you to notice that I was improving. I was not eavesdropping this time--I was merely letting Mackie do my eavesdropping for me. He glanced round to see whether the women below were watching, and then set his ear against the partition.

"Yes, it's Merridew," he chuckled. "Nice father's hope and mother's joy _that_ young man's getting! I don't suppose he's gone in there to talk to the secretary bird!..."

I found myself suddenly reminded of what I had noticed for the first time only an hour or two before--that the room beyond the partition was practically unlighted.

Then Mackie dropped again into the "bright" style affected by the singers of comic songs at smoking concerts.

"Ahem--good-hevening, ladies and gen'lmen! How am I? Very well, thank me! Ahem! I will now, with your kind permission, endeavour to entertain you with a few of my well-known impersonations on a subject that will appeal to all of you, no matter what your age, sex, condition, vaccination marks or the number of your dog licence--_London's Lovers_."

"Oh, Mr Mackie's going to recite for us!" I heard Miss Windus' cry of juvenile delight from down the stairs. "Please be quick, Mr Mackie--we shall have to go in in ten minutes!"

And those below pressed up the stairs to hear Mackie.

But I did not stay to hear the "impersonation." I walked back into the general room, and, with a violently throbbing heart, sought the seat where I had written my examination paper.

Do you realise what I had just seen? Do you see what had set my heart so thumping? If Mackie was right, and he had really got the cue for his "impersonation" from something that was going on in the ledger-room, young Merridew and Evie were alone in there together.

All that I had hitherto known of apprehension and despair and jealousy of Archie's luck and chances and juniority was eclipsed by the emotion that now flowed over me like a wave. The revelation swept me entirely off my balance. It seemed to me that once more I awoke as if out of a dream. I seemed to be standing as it were a little way off from my own baseless hopes and illusions of the past weeks and coldly contemplating my own egregiousness. I actually gave out loud a low laugh that harrowed myself. What! To suppose that all, all I could do, would prevent youth from coming together at the last!

So I made myself a spectacle of ridicule for myself.

Then, as the minutes passed, that which at first had seemed a pure and perfect whole of hopelessness changed subtly and began to separate into parts. And that brought such a change in me that I trembled to recognise it. The shock of those first moments had stunned me, but I was now coming out of my stupor. My first swift conclusion had been wrong. These were _not_ young lovers whom mountains could not sunder. She, my sleeping beauty, who had but now opened her eyes, no doubt thought I was that; her soul was over-brimming; and I remembered her look of wonder and reproach when, after she had congratulated me on that love-rise that is the most wondrous of earthly dawnings I had given a puzzled "on what?" When hearts can no longer contain that with which they ache to bursting, lucky is the one who stands nearest to hand. His it is to have, for the lifting of his finger, what else would spill. He may not be athirst for the draught; a muddier liquor might quench his fire as well; but this dew and ichor is his, though another parch for it.

For I needed no pointers from Mackie to know young Archie now. This was his ignored and heaven-high luck, and he did not even want it. If their being together in that unlighted room--their being together even as I sat with my head between my hands staring blankly at the yellow deal screen--if this meant anything at all it meant one thing and one thing only, that she must give because it was her nature to give, and the cub was philandering with her.

At that thought my despair gave place to something else. It was eaten up in the white flame of wrath that flashed like a brand in my brain.

"Oh!" I thought. "So _that's_ it, my Archie?..."

I need not tell you again how I always have made my angers serviceable to me. Five minutes later--though my will was well-nigh deracinated in the process--I was its master again. It still struggled like a beast in my hold, nor did I know whence the help could come without which it would presently have me in its power again, but I still retained my throttling hold on it. One last wild struggle the beast made; this was when beyond the end of my screen-enclosed compartment, I saw them issue, with an interval of half-a-minute between their coming out of the library doorway. He was pink and triumphant; at her I forbore to look. A minute later Mackie passed and gave an infinitesimally small jerk of his head and a wink; but by that time I was holding my savage beast down again.

Then a bell rang; there was a buzz and movement the candidates were making ready again. Once more attendants read the caution, and then the second paper was distributed. Mechanically I turned over the gelatine-copied leaves that had been handed to me.

But I pushed them away again. A man who is engaged as I still was--a luckless hunter who has missed his shot and is struggling desperately body to body with his intended prey--has little time for anything but the business in hand. True, I did draw the paper to me again and tick off the questions that would be productive of the highest marks, but it was long before I got any further. There would come between me and my page Archie Merridew's pink and boastful face as I had seen him issue from the library door.

I do not know how long I sat thus.

Draggingly at last I settled to work. But it was well-nigh hopeless. I came to myself after a long interval to find that I was staring blankly before me and muttering softly to myself. I had not written more than half-a-page. Wearily I tried again.

The next external thing that I was fully awake to was that from the typewriting-room there came the single "Ting" of the small clock on the mantelpiece. I started. That single "Ting" always meant one of two things--one o'clock or a half-hour. I had no watch.

I tried for a moment to persuade myself that the clock had just struck half-past two.

Then I heard the attendant's voice: "You have one hour left."

"Good heavens!" I groaned.

I drew my paper to me again.

For a time I was not conscious of anything but the questions that must be answered by half-past four. Indeed, so feverishly did I work that I did not hear the attendants announce that we had only half-an-hour longer. The next announcement I heard was that fifteen minutes only remained.

Swiftly and flurriedly I turned over what I had written. I was just half-way through the paper.

Wildly alarmed, I broke into rapid shorthand--the shorthand in which I am writing this now. I did not know whether the shorthand would be accepted; I only knew that in its larger aspect the object of the examination was to determine whether I was master of my subject. I was master of my subject. Those already diluted tests of capacity, the questions, dictated their own replies: I put on top speed.

"You have five minutes more," sounded the relentless voice.

But I could have sworn that not one minute elapsed before, much louder and more peremptory, came the final call:

"You must now cease writing!"

As I mingled with my fellow-candidates again I heard Mackie crying joyously, "Oh, we got medals for this in Paris!" But I passed him by without a glance. Nor had I any desire to linger about those premises my first sight of which in the daytime had cost me three shillings in cash, and a murderous rage that might indeed have closed the gates of heaven in my face. I went quickly for my hat and coat, almost colliding with Miss Causton as I turned a corner and muttering I know not what as she shrank back and gave me a look that I could hardly reconcile with her usually ironical and ruminating eyes. I merely wanted to get out of the place....

But I did not escape so quickly but that I saw Archie and Evie following me down the stairs. No doubt they were going together to her aunt's to tea.

A week later I learned that I had passed with distinction in the Theory part of the paper, but had failed in the Practice portion. The examiners made a joke about "Paper Number Two," saying they had decided to hold it over for next year's shorthand examination. Everybody knew whose paper Number Two was....

Mackie had passed in both portions.