The arrangement had not been effected without friction, the explanation had proved difficult.  Evidently she did not appreciate the full seriousness of Lewisham’s mediocre position in the list.  “But you have passed all right,” she said.  Neither could she grasp the importance of evening study.  “Of course I don’t know,” she said judicially; “but I thought you were learning all day.”  She calculated the time consumed by their walk as half an hour, “just one half hour;” she forgot that he had to get to Chelsea and then to return to his lodgings.  Her customary tenderness was veiled by an only too apparent resentment.  First at him, and then when he protested, at Fate.  “I suppose it has to be,” she said.  “Of course, it doesn’t matter, I suppose, if we don’t see each other quite so often,” with a quiver of pale lips.

He had returned from the parting with an uneasy mind, and that evening had gone in the composition of a letter that was to make things clearer.  But his scientific studies rendered his prose style “hard,” and things he could whisper he could not write.  His justification indeed did him no sort of justice.  But her reception of it made her seem a very unreasonable person.  He had some violent fluctuations.  At times he was bitterly angry with her for her failure to see things as he did.  He would wander about the museum conducting imaginary discussions with her and making even scathing remarks.  At other times he had to summon all his powers of acrid discipline and all his memories of her resentful retorts, to keep himself from a headlong rush to Chelsea and unmanly capitulation.

And this new disposition of things endured for two weeks.  It did not take Miss Heydinger all that time to discover that the disaster of the examination had wrought a change in Lewisham.  She perceived those nightly walks were over.  It was speedily evident to her that he was working with a kind of dogged fury; he came early, he went late.  The wholesome freshness of his cheek paled.  He was to be seen on each of the late nights amidst a pile of diagrams and text-books in one of the less draughty corners of the Educational Library, accumulating piles of memoranda.  And nightly in the Students’ “club” he wrote a letter addressed to a stationer’s shop in Clapham, but that she did not see.  For the most part these letters were brief, for Lewisham, South Kensington fashion, prided himself upon not being “literary,” and some of the more despatch-like wounded a heart perhaps too hungry for tender words.

He did not meet Miss Heydinger’s renewed advances with invariable kindness.  Yet something of the old relations were presently restored.  He would talk well to her for a time, and then snap like a dry twig.  But the loaning of books was resumed, the subtle process of his aesthetic education that Miss Heydinger had devised.  “Here is a book I promised you,” she said one day, and he tried to remember the promise.