He reached his lodging at last to find Mrs. Munday halfway through dinner.

“You get them books of yours,” said Mrs. Munday, who took a motherly interest in him, “and you read and you read, and you take no account of time.  And now you’ll have to eat your dinner half cold, and no time for it to settle proper before you goes off to school.  It’s ruination to a stummik—­such ways.”

“Oh, never mind my stomach, Mrs. Munday,” said Lewisham, roused from a tangled and apparently gloomy meditation; “that’s my affair.”  Quite crossly he spoke for him.

“I’d rather have a good sensible actin’ stummik than a full head,” said Mrs. Monday, “any day.”

“I’m different, you see,” snapped Mr. Lewisham, and relapsed into silence and gloom.

("Hoity toity!” said Mrs. Monday under her breath.)

CHAPTER V.

HESITATIONS.

Mr. Bonover, having fully matured a Hint suitable for the occasion, dropped it in the afternoon, while Lewisham was superintending cricket practice.  He made a few remarks about the prospects of the first eleven by way of introduction, and Lewisham agreed with him that Frobisher i. looked like shaping very well this season.

A pause followed and the headmaster hummed.  “By-the-bye,” he said, as if making conversation and still watching the play; “I, ah,—­understood that you, ah—­were a stranger to Whortley.”

“Yes,” said Lewisham, “that’s so.”

“You have made friends in the neighbourhood?”

Lewisham was troubled with a cough, and his ears—­those confounded ears—­brightened, “Yes,” he said, recovering, “Oh yes.  Yes, I have.”

“Local people, I presume.”

“Well, no.  Not exactly.”  The brightness spread from Lewisham’s ears over his face.

“I saw you,” said Bonover, “talking to a young lady in the avenue.  Her face was somehow quite familiar to me.  Who was she?”

Should he say she was a friend of the Frobishers?  In that case Bonover, in his insidious amiable way, might talk to the Frobisher parents and make things disagreeable for her.  “She was,” said Lewisham, flushing deeply with the stress on his honesty and dropping his voice to a mumble, “a ... a ... an old friend of my mother’s.  In fact, I met her once at Salisbury.”

“Where?”

“Salisbury.”

“And her name?”

“Smith,” said Lewisham, a little hastily, and repenting the lie even as it left his lips.

“Well hit, Harris!” shouted Bonover, and began to clap his hands.  “Well hit, sir.”

“Harris shapes very well,” said Mr. Lewisham.

“Very,” said Mr. Bonover.  “And—­what was it?  Ah!  I was just remarking the odd resemblances there are in the world.  There is a Miss Henderson—­or Henson—­stopping with the Frobishers—­in the very same town, in fact, the very picture of your Miss ...”