re, suggesting an
inherent wish to do rightly by all. His speech was a little slow,
but his tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect.
His greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle
of his crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he only
wore spectacles when reading at night. It was almost certainly a
renunciation forced upon him by his academic purpose, rather than a
distaste for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one
of the sex in matrimony.

Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated many
and oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick
and penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to
the self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making
him, in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet
glances, lest they should read what the dream within him was.

He had honourably acquiesced in Sue's announced wish that he was
not often to visit her at the training school; but at length, his
patience being sorely tried, he set out one Saturday afternoon to pay
her an unexpected call. There the news of her departure--expulsion
as it might almost have been considered--was flashed upon him without
warning or mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few
minutes to behold her face; and when he turned away he could hardly
see the road before him.

Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,
although it was fourteen days old. A short reflection told him that
this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for
silence as any degree of blameworthiness.

They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having
no immediate anxiety about her comfort his thoughts took the
direction of a burning indignation against the training school
committee. In his bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent
cathedral, just now in a direly dismantled state by reason of
the repairs. He sat down on a block of freestone, regardless of
the dusty imprint it made on his breeches; and his listless eyes
following the movements of the workmen he presently became aware
that the reputed culprit, Sue's lover Jude, was one amongst them.

Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the
model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson's
tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the
younger