But that guinea a week was not to go on for five-and-twenty weeks, but simply for fifteen, and then the net outgoings will be well over three guineas, reducing the “law” accorded our young couple to two-and-twenty weeks.  These details are tiresome and disagreeable, no doubt, to the refined reader, but just imagine how much more disagreeable they were to Mr. Lewisham, trudging meditative to the schools.  You will understand his slipping out of the laboratory, and betaking himself to the Educational Reading-room, and how it was that the observant Smithers, grinding his lecture notes against the now imminent second examination for the “Forbes,” was presently perplexed to the centre of his being by the spectacle of Lewisham intent upon a pile of current periodicals, the Educational Times, the Journal of Education, the Schoolmaster, Science and Art, The University Correspondent, Nature, The Athenaeum, The Academy, and The Author.

Smithers remarked the appearance of a note-book, the jotting down of memoranda.  He edged into the bay nearest Lewisham’s table and approached him suddenly from the flank.  “What are you after?” said Smithers in a noisy whisper and with a detective eye on the papers.  He perceived Lewisham was scrutinising the advertisement column, and his perplexity increased.

“Oh—­nothing,” said Lewisham blandly, with his hand falling casually over his memoranda; “what’s your particular little game?”

“Nothing much,” said Smithers, “just mooching round.  You weren’t at the meeting last Friday?”

He turned a chair, knelt on it, and began whispering over the back about Debating Society politics.  Lewisham was inattentive and brief.  What had he to do with these puerilities?  At last Smithers went away foiled, and met Parkson by the entrance.  Parkson, by-the-bye, had not spoken to Lewisham since their painful misunderstanding.  He made a wide detour to his seat at the end table, and so, and by a singular rectitude of bearing and a dignified expression, showed himself aware of Lewisham’s offensive presence.

Lewisham’s investigations were two-fold.  He wanted to discover some way of adding materially to that weekly guinea by his own exertions, and he wanted to learn the conditions of the market for typewriting.  For himself he had a vague idea, an idea subsequently abandoned, that it was possible to get teaching work in evening classes during the month of March.  But, except by reason of sadden death, no evening class in London changes its staff after September until July comes round again.  Private tuition, moreover, offered many attractions to him, but no definite proposals.  His ideas of his own possibilities were youthful or he would not have spent time in noting the conditions of application for a vacant professorship in physics at the Melbourne University.  He also made a note of the vacant editorship of a monthly magazine devoted to social questions.  He would not have minded doing that sort of thing at all, though the proprietor might.  There was also a vacant curatorship in the Museum of Eton College.