"Don't hurry; there is a car every ten minutes, and a very good place to wait in; there—take care of the wet box, please, with your dress, and take my arm, if you don't mind."
"Oh, no, thank you! Really, I am very well covered!" protested Marian, squeezing herself and her gown into the smallest possible space. The big umbrella was up before she knew it, and he was hobbling along the brick path by her side, in an old pair of yellow leather slippers as ill fitted to keep out the wet as her own shining little shoes.
"I am very sorry you should have been caught in this way," he said apologetically.
"I hope you have not far to go."
"Oh, no, indeed! That is—yes, rather far; but when I get into the car, I am all right, because it meets—I mean, I can take a cab. It is very easy to get about in town, you know." She turned while he opened the gate, and caught sight of the front windows, thronged, like the gates of Paradise Lost, with faces which might indeed have served as models for a very realistic study, in modern style, of cherubim, being those of healthy boys of all ages from twelve to twenty, each wearing a broad grin of delight.
"Confound 'em!" muttered her conductor in a low tone, but Marian caught the words, and the accompanying grimace which he flung back over his shoulder. Could his remarkable house be a boys' school? If so, he was the very oddest teacher, and his discipline the most extraordinary, she had ever heard of; it was too easy of egress, surely, to be a private lunatic asylum, a thought which had already excited her fears.
"Please lower your head a little, Miss—" he paused for the name, but she did not fill up the gap; "the creepers hang so low here," and he carefully held the umbrella so as best to protect her from the dripping sprays.
"How very pretty your garden is!" she said as he closed the gate.
"It is a sad straggling place; we all run pretty wild here, I am afraid."