“Smith,” said Lewisham, meeting his eye and recovering the full crimson note of his first blush.

“It’s odd,” said Bonover, regarding him pensively.

“Very odd,” mumbled Lewisham, cursing his own stupidity and looking away.

“Very—­very odd,” said Bonover.

“In fact,” said Bonover, turning towards the school-house, “I hardly expected it of you, Mr. Lewisham.”

“Expected what, sir?”

But Mr. Bonover feigned to be already out of earshot.

“Damn!” said Mr. Lewisham.  “Oh!—­damn!”—­a most objectionable expression and rare with him in those days.  He had half a mind to follow the head-master and ask him if he doubted his word.  It was only too evident what the answer would be.

He stood for a minute undecided, then turned on his heel and marched homeward with savage steps.  His muscles quivered as he walked, and his face twitched.  The tumult of his mind settled at last into angry indignation.

“Confound him!” said Mr. Lewisham, arguing the matter out with the bedroom furniture.  “Why the devil can’t he mind his own business?”

“Mind your own business, sir!” shouted Mr. Lewisham at the wash-hand stand.  “Confound you, sir, mind your own business!”

The wash-hand stand did.

“You overrate your power, sir,” said Mr. Lewisham, a little mollified.  “Understand me!  I am my own master out of school.”

Nevertheless, for four days and some hours after Mr. Bonover’s Hint, Mr. Lewisham so far observed its implications as to abandon open-air study and struggle with diminishing success to observe the spirit as well as the letter of his time-table prescriptions.  For the most part he fretted at accumulating tasks, did them with slipshod energy or looked out of window.  The Career constituent insisted that to meet and talk to this girl again meant reproof, worry, interference with his work for his matriculation, the destruction of all “Discipline,” and he saw the entire justice of the insistence.  It was nonsense this being in love; there wasn’t such a thing as love outside of trashy novelettes.  And forthwith his mind went off at a tangent to her eyes under the shadow of her hat brim, and had to be lugged back by main force.  On Thursday when he was returning from school he saw her far away down the street, and hurried in to avoid her, looking ostentatiously in the opposite direction.  But that was a turning-point.  Shame overtook him.  On Friday his belief in love was warm and living again, and his heart full of remorse for laggard days.

On Saturday morning his preoccupation with her was so vivid that it distracted him even while he was teaching that most teachable subject, algebra, and by the end of the school hours the issue was decided and the Career in headlong rout.  That afternoon he would go, whatever happened, and see her and speak to her again.  The thought of Bonover arose only to be dismissed.  And besides—­