In the blackness of the shed he worked himself up to the pitch of talking as if she were present.  And he said some fine brave things.

He found the little old lady of the wallflowers with a candle in her window, and drank a bottle of ginger beer with a sacramental air.  The little old lady asked him, a trifle archly, after his sister, and he promised to bring her again some day.  “I’ll certainly bring her,” he said.  Talking to the little old lady somehow blunted his sense of desolation.  And then home through the white indistinctness in a state of melancholy that became at last so fine as to be almost pleasurable.

The day after that mood a new “text” attracted and perplexed Mrs. Munday, an inscription at once mysterious and familiar, and this inscription was: 

Mizpah.

It was in Old English lettering and evidently very carefully executed.

Where had she seen it before?

It quite dominated all the rest of the room at first, it flaunted like a flag of triumph over “discipline” and the time-table and the Schema.  Once indeed it was taken down, but the day after it reappeared.  Later a list of scholastic vacancies partially obscured it, and some pencil memoranda were written on the margin.

And when at last the time came for him to pack up and leave Whortley, he took it down and used it with several other suitable papers—­the Schema and the time-table were its next-door neighbours—­to line the bottom of the yellow box in which he packed his books:  chiefly books for that matriculation that had now to be postponed.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CAREER PREVAILS.

There is an interval of two years and a half and the story resumes with a much maturer Mr. Lewisham, indeed no longer a youth, but a man, a legal man, at any rate, of one-and-twenty years.  Its scene is no longer little Whortley embedded among its trees, ruddy banks, parks and common land, but the grey spaciousness of West London.

And it does not resume with Ethel at all.  For that promised second letter never reached him, and though he spent many an afternoon during his first few months in London wandering about Clapham, that arid waste of people, the meeting that he longed for never came.  Until at last, after the manner of youth, so gloriously recuperative in body, heart, and soul, he began to forget.

The quest of a “crib” had ended in the unexpected fruition of Dunkerley’s blue paper.  The green-blue certificates had, it seemed, a value beyond mural decoration, and when Lewisham was already despairing of any employment for the rest of his life, came a marvellous blue document from the Education Department promising inconceivable things.  He was to go to London and be paid a guinea a week for listening to lectures—­lectures beyond his most ambitious dreams!  Among the names that swam before his eyes was Huxley—­Huxley and then Lockyer!  What a chance to get!  Is it any wonder that for three memorable years the Career prevailed with him?