Suddenly his expression changed.  Movement dictionary-ward ceased.  He was listening to a light tapping sound—­it was a footfall—­outside.

He stood up abruptly, and, stretching his neck, peered through his unnecessary glasses and the diamond panes down into the street.  Looking acutely downward he could see a hat daintily trimmed with pinkish white blossom, the shoulder of a jacket, and just the tips of nose and chin.  Certainly the stranger who sat under the gallery last Sunday next the Frobishers.  Then, too, he had seen her only obliquely....

He watched her until she passed beyond the window frame.  He strained to see impossibly round the corner....

Then he started, frowned, took his pen from his mouth.  “This wandering attention!” he said.  “The slightest thing!  Where was I?  Tcha!” He made a noise with his teeth to express his irritation, sat down, and replaced his knees in the upturned box.  “Urit me,” he said, biting the end of his pen and looking for his dictionary.

It was a Wednesday half-holiday late in March, a spring day glorious in amber light, dazzling white clouds and the intensest blue, casting a powder of wonderful green hither and thither among the trees and rousing all the birds to tumultuous rejoicings, a rousing day, a clamatory insistent day, a veritable herald of summer.  The stir of that anticipation was in the air, the warm earth was parting above the swelling seeds, and all the pine-woods were full of the minute crepitation of opening bud scales.  And not only was the stir of Mother Nature’s awakening in the earth and the air and the trees, but also in Mr. Lewisham’s youthful blood, bidding him rouse himself to live—­live in a sense quite other than that the Schema indicated.

He saw the dictionary peeping from under a paper, looked up “Urit me,” appreciated the shining “nitor” of Glycera’s shoulders, and so fell idle again to rouse himself abruptly.

“I can’t fix my attention,” said Mr. Lewisham.  He took off the needless glasses, wiped them, and blinked his eyes.  This confounded Horace and his stimulating epithets!  A walk?

“I won’t be beat,” he said—­incorrectly—­replaced his glasses, brought his elbows down on either side of his box with resonant violence, and clutched the hair over his ears with both hands....

In five minutes’ time he found himself watching the swallows curving through the blue over the vicarage garden.

“Did ever man have such a bother with himself as me?” he asked vaguely but vehemently.  “It’s self-indulgence does it—­sitting down’s the beginning of laziness.”

So he stood up to his work, and came into permanent view of the village street.  “If she has gone round the corner by the post office, she will come in sight over the palings above the allotments,” suggested the unexplored and undisciplined region of Mr. Lewisham’s mind....