gions of his mind
flashed into revolt.

Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.

"I say," he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his
mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral. "But that
sheet of paper ..."

"Yes," she said surprised--quite naturally.

"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 tru