The written part of the examination lasted four days; and then there was an interval of one day in which the harassed and harried aspirants might restore themselves for the two days’ ordeal of the viva voce.  George had continued to be well satisfied with his work up to the interval.  He considered that he had perfectly succeeded in separating the lover and the examinee, and that nothing foreign to the examination could vitiate his activity therein.  It was on the day of repose, a Wednesday, that a doubt suddenly occurred to him as to the correctness of his answer, in the “Construction” paper, to a question which began with the following formidable words:  “A girder, freely supported at each end and forty feet long, carries a load of six tons at a distance of six feet from one end and another load of ten tons——­” Thus it went on for ten lines.  He had always been impatient of detail, and he hated every kind of calculation.  Nevertheless he held that calculations were relatively easy, and that he could do them as well as the driest duffer in the profession when he set his mind to them.  But the doubt as to the correctness of his answer developed into a certainty.  Facing the question in private again, he obtained four different solutions in an hour; it was John Orgreave who ultimately set him right, convicting him of a most elementary misconception.  Forthwith his faith in his whole “Construction” paper vanished.  He grumbled that it was monstrous to give candidates an unbroken stretch of four hours’ work at the end of a four-day effort.  Yet earlier he had been boasting that he had not felt the slightest fatigue.  He had expected to see Marguerite on the day of repose.  He did not see her.  She had offered no appointment, and he said to himself that he had not the slightest intention of running after her.  Such had become the attitude of the lover to the beloved.

On the Thursday morning, however, he felt fit enough to face a dozen oral examiners, and he performed his morning exercises in the club bedroom with a positive ferocity of vigour.  And then he was gradually overtaken by a black moodiness which he could not explain.  He had passed through similar though less acute moods as a boy; but this was the first of the inexplicable sombre humours which at moments darkened his manhood.  He had not the least suspicion that prolonged nervous tension due to two distinct causes had nearly worn him out.  He was melancholy, and his melancholy increased.  But he was proud; he was defiant.  His self-confidence, as he looked back at the years of genuine hard study behind him, was complete.  He disdained examiners.  He knew that with all their damnable ingenuity they could not floor him.