true now. What he was regarding was
not history. They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly
hand at his dictation some months before, and it was the clerical
rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,
few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its
envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same
womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by
one and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these
small documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were
straightforward, frank letters, signed "Sue B--"; just such ones as
would be written during short absences, with no other thought than
their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading
and other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by
the writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of
them--quite a recent note--the young woman said that she had received
his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of
him to say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the
school being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her
strong wish that her engagement to him should not be known, which it
would infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the
school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be
gathered from a woman's gratitude that the man who loved her had not
been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.

He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from which
he drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had known her,
standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand. There
was another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a
very distinct and attractive picture of her, which just disclosed,
too, the thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods. It was
a duplicate of the one she had given Jude, and would have given to
any man. Phillotson brought it half-way to his lips, but withdrew
it in doubt at her perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing the
dead pasteboard with all the passionateness, and more than all the
devotion, of a young man of eighteen.

The schoolmaster's was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,
rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving. A certain
gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by natu