He read through his manuscript, and then sat thinking and gnawing his knuckle.  It would look queer now if he owned up.  He must beat Wedderburn.  He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns and Bradlaugh.  Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the slip he had had was, after all, quite accidental, forced upon him by chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage.  It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a first-class.  “Five minutes more,” said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant.  Hill watched the clock hands until two minutes remained; then he opened the book of answers, and, with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.

When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human), said that in the result of the two examinations taken together Hill had the advantage of a mark—­167 to 166 out of a possible 200.  Everyone admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of “mugging” clung to him.  But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion of him, and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn, tainted by an unhappy memory.  He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating-society speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and he went on with his aesthetic education.  But through it all, a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind’s eye—­of a sneakish person manipulating a slide.

No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher power existed to see, it; but for all that it worried him.  Memories are not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted.  Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on, his memory became confused about it, until at last he was not sure—­although he assured himself that he was sure—­whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary.  Then it is possible that Hill’s dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as his means determined, usually in a chop-house in a back street off the Brompton Road.  Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops.  It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity.  But apart from