“May I have it?”

“Why?”

He felt a breathless pleasure, like that of sliding down a slope of snow.  “I would like to have it.”

She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but his excitement was now too great for smiling.  “Look here!” she said, and displayed the sheet crumpled into a ball.  She laughed—­with a touch of effort.

“I don’t mind that,” said Mr. Lewisham, laughing too.  He captured the paper by an insistent gesture and smoothed it out with fingers that trembled.

“You don’t mind?” he said.

“Mind what?”

“If I keep it?”

“Why should I?”

Pause.  Their eyes met again.  There was an odd constraint about both of them, a palpitating interval of silence.

“I really must be going,” she said suddenly, breaking the spell by an effort.  She turned about and left him with the crumpled piece of paper in the fist that held the book, the other hand lifting the mortar board in a dignified salute again.

He watched her receding figure.  His heart was beating with remarkable rapidity.  How light, how living she seemed!  Little round flakes of sunlight raced down her as she went.  She walked fast, then slowly, looking sideways once or twice, but not back, until she reached the park gates.  Then she looked towards him, a remote friendly little figure, made a gesture of farewell, and disappeared.

His face was flushed and his eyes bright.  Curiously enough, he was out of breath.  He stared for a long time at the vacant end of the avenue.  Then he turned his eyes to his trophy gripped against the closed and forgotten Horace in his hand.

CHAPTER III.

THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.

On Sunday it was Lewisham’s duty to accompany the boarders twice to church.  The boys sat in the gallery above the choirs facing the organ loft and at right angles to the general congregation.  It was a prominent position, and made him feel painfully conspicuous, except in moods of exceptional vanity, when he used to imagine that all these people were thinking how his forehead and his certificates accorded.  He thought a lot in those days of his certificates and forehead, but little of his honest, healthy face beneath it. (To tell the truth there was nothing very wonderful about his forehead.) He rarely looked down the church, as he fancied to do so would be to meet the collective eye of the congregation regarding him.  So that in the morning he was not able to see that the Frobishers’ pew was empty until the litany.

But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side.  And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity.  She looked at him calmly!  He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance.  Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher.  Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little unexpected.  Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him....  He entered church in a mood of black despair.