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"No," said Lewisham, "I haven't an idea." "If Mr. Dunkerley had asked you?..." persisted Bonover, knowing Lewisham's respect for etiquette. "Oh! it wasn't on that account," said Lewisham, and Bonover with eyebrows still raised and a general air of outraged astonishment left him standing there, white and stiff, and wondering at his extraordinary temerity.
How could he explain it to her, when the meeting really came? Suppose he was very frank He considered the limits of frankness. Would she believe he had not seen her on Thursday? if he assured her that it was so? And, most horrible, in the midst of all this came Bonover with a request that he would take "duty" in the cricket field instead of Dunkerley that afternoon.
Quite crossly he spoke for him. "I'd rather have a good sensible actin' stummik than a full head," said Mrs. Monday, "any day." "I'm different, you see," snapped Mr. Lewisham, and relapsed into silence and gloom. Mr. Bonover, having fully matured a Hint suitable for the occasion, dropped it in the afternoon, while Lewisham was superintending cricket practice.
Day boys were whispering in the morning apparently about him, and Frobisher ii. was in great request. Lewisham overheard a fragment "My mother was in a wax," said Frobisher ii. At twelve came an interview with Bonover, and voices presently rising in angry altercation and audible to Senior-assistant Dunkerley through the closed study door.
Several people saw them and wondered what the boys and girls were coming to nowadays, and one eye-witness even subsequently described their carriage as "brazen." Mr. Lewisham was wearing his mortarboard cap of office there was no mistaking him. They passed the Proprietary School and saw a yellow picture framed and glazed, of Mr. Bonover taking duty for his aberrant assistant master.
Bonover passed, forehead tight reefed so to speak, and lips impressively compressed. Mr. Lewisham raised his mortar-board, and to his astonishment Mr. Bonover responded with a markedly formal salute mock clerical hat sweeping circuitously and the regard of a searching, disapproving eye, and so passed.
And, to be still more intimate, he studied his callow appearance in the glass from various points of view, and decided that his nose might have been a little smaller with advantage.... Directly after dinner he went out, and by the shortest path to the allotment lane, telling himself he did not care if he met Bonover forthwith in the street.
After a careful consideration of the time-table, he set aside the midday hour for "Correspondence." He found that his work in mathematics and classics was already some time in arrears, and a "test" he had sent to his correspondence Tutor during those troublous days after the meeting with Bonover in the Avenue, came back blottesquely indorsed: "Below Pass Standard."
"You have made friends in the neighbourhood?" Lewisham was troubled with a cough, and his ears those confounded ears brightened, "Yes," he said, recovering, "Oh yes. Yes, I have." "Local people, I presume." "Well, no. Not exactly." The brightness spread from Lewisham's ears over his face. "I saw you," said Bonover, "talking to a young lady in the avenue. Her face was somehow quite familiar to me.
Who was she?" Should he say she was a friend of the Frobishers? In that case Bonover, in his insidious amiable way, might talk to the Frobisher parents and make things disagreeable for her. "She was," said Lewisham, flushing deeply with the stress on his honesty and dropping his voice to a mumble, "a ... a ... an old friend of my mother's. In fact, I met her once at Salisbury." "Where?"
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