“Here’s Lewisham!  How did you get on, Lewisham?” asked Smithers, not concealing his assurance.

“Horribly,” said Lewisham shortly, and pushed past.

“Did you spot D?” clamoured Smithers.

Lewisham pretended not to hear.

Miss Heydinger stood with her hat in her hand and looked at Lewisham’s hot eyes.  He was for walking past her, but something in her face penetrated even his disturbance.  He stopped.

“Did you get out the nephridium?” he said as graciously as he could.

She shook her head.  “Are you going downstairs?” she asked.

“Rather,” said Lewisham, with a vague intimation in his manner of the offence Smithers gave him.

He opened the glass door from the passage to the staircase.  They went down one tier of that square spiral in silence.

“Are you coming up again next year?” asked Miss Heydinger.

“No,” said Lewisham.  “No, I shall not come here again.  Ever.”

Pause.  “What will you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.  I have to get a living somehow.  It’s been bothering me all the session.”

“I thought—­” She stopped.  “Will you go down to your uncle’s again?” she said.

“No.  I shall stop in London.  It’s no good going out of things into the country.  And besides—­I’ve quarrelled rather with my uncle.”

“What do you think of doing?—­teaching?”

“I suppose it will be teaching, I’m not sure.  Anything that turns up.”

“I see,” she said.

They went on down in silence for a time.

“I suppose you will come up again?” he asked.

“I may try the botanical again—­if they can find room.  And, I was thinking—­sometimes one hears of things.  What is your address?  So that if I heard of anything.”

Lewisham stopped on the staircase and thought.  “Of course,” he said.  He made no effort to give her the address, and she demanded it again at the foot of the stairs.

“That confounded nephridium—!” he said.  “It has put everything out of my head.”

They exchanged addresses on leaflets torn from Miss Heydinger’s little note-book.

She waited at the Book in the hall while he signed his name.  At the iron gates of the Schools she said:  “I am going through Kensington Gardens.”

He was now feeling irritated about the addresses, and he would not see 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.