“Ran away with me.  And now poor little Teddy will get into worse trouble for letting me....”

“Oh no,” said Mr. Lewisham, perceiving an opportunity and trying not to smile his appreciation of what he was saying.  “I had no business to read this as I picked it up—­absolutely no business.  Consequently....”

“You won’t take any notice of it?  Really!”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Lewisham.

Her face lit with a smile, and Mr. Lewisham’s relaxed in sympathy.  “It is nothing—­it’s the proper thing for me to do, you know.”

“But so many people won’t do it.  Schoolmasters are not usually so—­chivalrous.”

He was chivalrous!  The phrase acted like a spur.  He obeyed a foolish impulse.

“If you like—­” he said.

“What?”

“He needn’t do this.  The Impot., I mean.  I’ll let him off.”

“Really?”

“I can.”

“It’s awfully kind of you.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.  “It’s nothing much.  If you really think ...”

He was full of self-applause for this scandalous sacrifice of justice.

“It’s awfully kind of you,” she said.

“It’s nothing, really,” he explained, “nothing.”

“Most people wouldn’t—­”

“I know.”

Pause.

“It’s all right,” he said.  “Really.”

He would have given worlds for something more to say, something witty and original, but nothing came.

The pause lengthened.  She glanced over her shoulder down the vacant avenue.  This interview—­this momentous series of things unsaid was coming to an end!  She looked at him hesitatingly and smiled again.  She held out her hand.  No doubt that was the proper thing to do.  He took it, searching a void, tumultuous mind in vain.

“It’s awfully kind of you,” she said again as she did so.

“It don’t matter a bit,” said Mr. Lewisham, and sought vainly for some other saying, some doorway remark into new topics.  Her hand was cool and soft and firm, the most delightful thing to grasp, and this observation ousted all other things.  He held it for a moment, but nothing would come.

They discovered themselves hand in hand.  They both laughed and felt “silly.”  They shook hands in the manner of quite intimate friends, and snatched their hands away awkwardly.  She turned, glanced timidly at him over her shoulder, and hesitated.  “Good-bye,” she said, and was suddenly walking from him.

He bowed to her receding back, made a seventeenth-century sweep with his college cap, and then some hitherto unexplored regions of his mind flashed into revolt.

Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.

“I say,” he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral.  “But that sheet of paper ...”

“Yes,” she said surprised—­quite naturally.