“Fool!”

It was a relief—­a definite abandonment.  He stared for a moment at the destruction he had made, and then went back to the revision of the time-table, with a mutter about “silly spooning.”

That was one mood.  The rarer one.  He watched the posts with far more eagerness for the address to which he might write to her than for any reply to those reiterated letters of application, the writing of which now ousted Horace and the higher mathematics (Lewisham’s term for conics) from his attention.  Indeed he spent more time meditating the letter to her than even the schedule of his virtues had required.

Yet the letters of application were wonderful compositions; each had a new pen to itself and was for the first page at least in a handwriting far above even his usual high standard.  And day after day passed and that particular letter he hoped for still did not come.

His moods were complicated by the fact that, in spite of his studied reticence on the subject, the reason of his departure did in an amazingly short time get “all over Whortley.”  It was understood that he had been discovered to be “fast,” and Ethel’s behaviour was animadverted upon with complacent Indignation—­if the phrase may be allowed—­by the ladies of the place.  Pretty looks were too often a snare.  One boy—­his ear was warmed therefor—­once called aloud “Ethel,” as Lewisham went by.  The curate, a curate of the pale-faced, large-knuckled, nervous sort, now passed him without acknowledgment of his existence.  Mrs. Bonover took occasion to tell him that he was a “mere boy,” and once Mrs. Frobisher sniffed quite threateningly at him when she passed him in the street.  She did it so suddenly she made him jump.

This general disapproval inclined him at times to depression, but in certain moods he found it exhilarating, and several times he professed himself to Dunkerley not a little of a blade.  In others, he told himself he bore it for her sake.  Anyhow he had to bear it.

He began to find out, too, how little the world feels the need of a young man of nineteen—­he called himself nineteen, though he had several months of eighteen still to run—­even though he adds prizes for good conduct, general improvement, and arithmetic, and advanced certificates signed by a distinguished engineer and headed with the Royal Arms, guaranteeing his knowledge of geometrical drawing, nautical astronomy, animal physiology, physiography, inorganic chemistry, and building construction, to his youth and strength and energy.  At first he had imagined headmasters clutching at the chance of him, and presently he found himself clutching eagerly at them.  He began to put a certain urgency into his applications for vacant posts, an urgency that helped him not at all.  The applications grew longer and longer until they ran to four sheets of note-paper—­a pennyworth in fact.  “I can assure you,” he would write, “that you will find me a loyal and devoted assistant.”  Much in that strain.  Dunkerley pointed out that Bonover’s testimonial ignored the question of moral character and discipline in a marked manner, and Bonover refused to alter it.  He was willing to do what he could to help Lewisham, in spite of the way he had been treated, but unfortunately his conscience....