“I hope,” said Lewisham, making a resolute plunge, “perhaps while you are staying at Whortley ...”
He paused perceptibly, and she, following his eyes, saw a voluminous black figure approaching. “We may,” said Mr. Lewisham, resuming his remark, “chance to meet again, perhaps.”
He had been about to challenge her to a deliberate meeting. A certain delightful tangle of paths that followed the bank of the river had been in his mind. But the apparition of Mr. George Bonover, headmaster of the Whortley Proprietary School, chilled him amazingly. Dame Nature no doubt had arranged the meeting of our young couple, but about Bonover she seems to have been culpably careless. She now receded inimitably, and Mr. Lewisham, with the most unpleasant feelings, found himself face to face with a typical representative of a social organisation which objects very strongly inter alia to promiscuous conversation on the part of the young unmarried junior master.
“—chance to meet again, perhaps,” said Mr. Lewisham, with a sudden lack of spirit.
“I hope so too,” she said.
Pause. Mr. Bonover’s features, and particularly a bushy pair of black eyebrows, were now very near, those eyebrows already raised, apparently to express a refined astonishment.
“Is this Mr. Bonover approaching?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Prolonged pause.
Would he stop and accost them? At any rate this frightful silence must end. Mr. Lewisham sought in his mind for some remark wherewith to cover his employer’s approach. He was surprised to find his mind a desert. He made a colossal effort. If they could only talk, if they could only seem at their ease! But this blank incapacity was eloquent of guilt. Ah!
“It’s a lovely day, though,” said Mr. Lewisham. “Isn’t it?”
She agreed with him. “Isn’t it?” she said.
And then Mr. Bonover passed, forehead tight reefed so to speak, and lips impressively compressed. Mr. Lewisham raised his mortar-board, and to his astonishment Mr. Bonover responded with a markedly formal
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