her address should come. If it
was to come. He prowled about the village disconsolately, and at last
set off about seven and retraced by moonlight almost every step of
that one memorable walk of theirs.

In the blackness of the shed he worked himself up to the pitch of
talking as if she were present. And he said some fine brave things.

He found the little old lady of the wallflowers with a candle in her
window, and drank a bottle of ginger beer with a sacramental air. The
little old lady asked him, a trifle archly, after his sister, and he
promised to bring her again some day. "I'll certainly bring her," he
said. Talking to the little old lady somehow blunted his sense of
desolation. And then home through the white indistinctness in a state
of melancholy that became at last so fine as to be almost pleasurable.

The day after that mood a new "text" attracted and perplexed
Mrs. Munday, an inscription at once mysterious and familiar, and this
inscription was:

Mizpah.

It was in Old English lettering and evidently very carefully executed.

Where had she seen it before?

It quite dominated all the rest of the room at first, it flaunted like
a flag of triumph over "discipline" and the time-table and the
Schema. Once indeed it was taken down, but the day after it
reappeared. Later a list of scholastic vacancies partially obscured
it, and some pencil memoranda were written on the margin.

And when at last the time came for him to pack up and leave Whortley,
he took it down and used it with several other suitable papers--the
Schema and the time-table were its next-door neighbours--to line the
bottom of the yellow box in which he packed his books: chiefly books
for that matriculation that had now to be postponed.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CAREER PREVAILS.

There is an interval of two years and a half and the story resumes
with a much maturer Mr. Lewisham, indeed no longer a youth, but a man,
a legal man, at any rate, of one-and-twenty years. Its scene is no
longer little Whortley embedded among its trees, ruddy banks, parks
and common land, but the grey spaciousness of West London.

And it does not resume with Ethel at all. For that promised second
letter never reached him, and though he spent many an afternoon during
his first few months in London wandering about Clapham, that arid
waste of people, the meeting that he longed for never came. Until at
last, after the manner of youth, so gloriously recuperative