* * * * *

The next day one of the other girls in the biological course remarked to her friend that “Heydinger-dingery” had relapsed.  Her friend glanced down the laboratory.  “It’s a bad relapse,” she said.  “Really ...  I couldn’t ... wear my hair like that.”

She continued to regard Miss Heydinger with a critical eye.  She was free to do this because Miss Heydinger was standing, lost in thought, staring at the December fog outside the laboratory windows.  “She looks white,” said the girl who had originally spoken.  “I wonder if she works hard.”

“It makes precious little difference if she does,” said her friend.  “I asked her yesterday what were the bones in the parietal segment, and she didn’t know one.  Not one.”

The next day Miss Heydinger’s place was vacant.  She was ill—­from overstudy—­and her illness lasted to within three weeks of the terminal examination.  Then she came back with a pallid face and a strenuous unavailing industry.

CHAPTER XVII.

IN THE RAPHAEL GALLERY.

It was nearly three o’clock, and in the Biological Laboratory the lamps were all alight.  The class was busy with razors cutting sections of the root of a fern to examine it microscopically.  A certain silent frog-like boy, a private student who plays no further part in this story, was working intently, looking more like a frog than usual—­his expression modest with a touch of effort.  Behind Miss Heydinger, jaded and untidy in her early manner again, was a vacant seat, an abandoned microscope and scattered pencils and note-books.

On the door of the class-room was a list of those who had passed the Christmas examination.  At the head of it was the name of the aforesaid frog-like boy; next to him came Smithers and one of the girls bracketed together.  Lewisham ingloriously headed the second class, and Miss Heydinger’s name did not appear—­there was, the list asserted, “one failure.”  So the student pays for the finer emotions.

And in the spacious solitude of the museum gallery devoted to the Raphael cartoons sat Lewisham, plunged in gloomy meditation.  A negligent hand pulled thoughtfully at the indisputable moustache, with particular attention to such portions as were long enough to gnaw.

He was trying to see the situation clearly.  As he was just smarting acutely under his defeat, this speaks little for the clearness of his mind.  The shadow of that defeat lay across everything, blotted out the light of his pride, shaded his honour, threw everything into a new perspective.  The rich prettiness of his love-making had fled to some remote quarter of his being.  Against the frog-like youngster he felt a savage animosity.  And Smithers had betrayed him.  He was angry, bitterly angry, with “swats” and “muggers” who spent their whole time grinding for these foolish chancy examinations.  Nor had the practical examination