“This man is one of my converts,” said Trefusis apart to Henrietta.  “He told me the other day that since I set him thinking he never sees a gentleman without feeling inclined to heave a brick at him.  I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.  Now I am going to carry you along this plank.  If you keep quiet, we may reach the barge.  If not, we shall reach the bottom of the canal.”

He carried her safely over, and exchanged some friendly words with the bargee.  Then he took Henrietta forward, and stood watching the water as they were borne along noiselessly between the hilly pastures of the country.

“This would be a fairy journey,” he said, “if one could forget the woman down below, cooking her husband’s dinner in a stifling hole about as big as your wardrobe, and—­”

“Oh, don’t talk any more of these things,” she said crossly; “I cannot help them.  I have my own troubles to think of.  Her husband lives with her.”

“She will change places with you, my dear, if you make her the offer.”

She had no answer ready.  After a pause he began to speak poetically of the scenery and to offer her loverlike speeches and compliments.  But she felt that he intended to get rid of her, and he knew that it was useless to try to hide that design from her.  She turned away and sat down on a pile of bricks, only writhing angrily when he pressed her for a word.  As they neared the end of her voyage, and her intense protest against desertion remained, as she thought, only half expressed, her sense of injury grew almost unbearable.

They landed on a wharf, and went through an unswept, deeply-rutted lane up to the main street of Lyvern.  Here he became Smilash again, walking deferentially a little before her, as if she had hired him to point out the way.  She then saw that her last opportunity of appealing to him had gone by, and she nearly burst into tears at the thought.  It occurred to her that she might prevail upon him by making a scene in public.  But the street was a busy one, and she was a little afraid of him.  Neither consideration would have checked her in one of her ungovernable moods, but now she was in an abject one.  Her moods seemed to come only when they were harmful to her.  She suffered herself to be put into the railway omnibus, which was on the point of starting from the innyard when they arrived there, and though he touched his hat, asked whether she had any message to give him, and in a tender whisper wished her a safe journey, she would not look at or speak to him.  So they parted, and he returned alone to the chalet, where he was received by the two policemen who subsequently brought him to the college.

CHAPTER VI