ee
the implicit invitation. "I am going towards Chelsea."

She hesitated a moment, looking at him--puzzled. "Good-bye, then,"
she said.

"Good-bye," he answered, lifting his hat.

He crossed the Exhibition Road slowly with his packed glazed bag, now
seamed with cracks, in his hand. He went thoughtfully down to the
corner of the Cromwell Road and turned along that to the right so that
he could see the red pile of the Science Schools rising fair, and
tall across the gardens of the Natural History Museum. He looked back
towards it regretfully.

He was quite sure that he had failed in this last examination. He
knew that any career as a scientific man was now closed to him for
ever. And he remembered now how he had come along this very road to
that great building for the first time in his life, and all the hopes
and resolves that had swelled within him as he had drawn near. That
dream of incessant unswerving work! Where might he have reached if
only he had had singleness of purpose to realise that purpose?...

And in these gardens it was that he and Smithers and Parkson had sat
on a seat hard by the fossil tree, and discoursed of Socialism
together before the great paper was read....

"Yes," he said, speaking aloud to himself; "yes--_that's_
all over too. Everything's over."

Presently the corner of the Natural History Museum came between him
and his receding Alma Mater. He sighed and turned his face towards the
stuffy little rooms at Chelsea, and the still unconquered world.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CONCERNING A QUARREL.

It was late in September that this particular quarrel occurred. Almost
all the roseate tints seemed gone by this time, for the Lewishams had
been married six months. Their financial affairs had changed from the
catastrophic to the sordid; Lewisham had found work. An army crammer
named Captain Vigours wanted someone energetic for his mathematical
duffers and to teach geometrical drawing and what he was pleased to
call "Sandhurst Science." He paid no less than two shillings an hour
for his uncertain demands on Lewisham's time. Moreover, there was a
class in lower mathematics beginning at Walham Green where Lewisham
was to show his quality. Fifty shillings a week or more seemed
credible--more might be hoped for. It was now merely a case of tiding
over the interval until Vigours paid. And meanwhile the freshness of
Ethel's blouses departed, and Lewisham refrained from the repair of
his boot which