AN UGLY FALL.
There was a row royal when Pamela got back to Newnham. She told Lucy that her conduct was disgraceful, and that if it came to the ears of the Dons she would be 'hauled.'
There had been several girls 'hauled' lately for the same offence—walking with an undergraduate to the very gate of the college.
Lucy mildly suggested that she was not exactly alone, that Pamela and her brother were with her, and that she herself, when she came up to her on the bridge, was walking in the young man's society.
'You forget that Eric was with me,' Pamela replied sharply. 'It makes all the difference if you have a brother, or any male relative, with you; but to be walking alone, tearing along at the rate you were, and talking confidentially—anyone could see that you were talking confidentially—dozens of girls have been sent down for less than that!'
Lucy wasn't 'hauled,' and she wasn't 'sent down'; but Pamela behaved like a bear to her for the remainder of the term.
Lucy was so anxious about the Master that she went over to the lodge the next day directly after lunch. Cousin Mary was out; she had left him sitting in his chair taking his after-dinner nap as usual, and she had gone out. He woke up directly Lucy came in, and began to talk to her about her father and the old time. She was very glad that she had not brought Pamela in with her, or any of the Newnham girls, as she sometimes did. He would have told them that ridiculous story that was running in his mind, how his brother Dick had met her mother at a dancing-booth at the fair. He would have dwelt on all the homely details of their humble history. It would have been all over Newnham the next day that her father was a ploughman, and her mother kept a stall in the butter-market. Annabel Crewe, who had a fine taste for caricature, would have drawn delightful pictures of Lucy's progenitors—a lovely old man in a smock-frock with straw round his legs, and a milkmaid with her pail!
She couldn't divert the Master's attention from this ridiculous topic. He had forgotten all about the things that had happened in later years, and had gone back in memory to the old familiar scenes and faces of his youth. His eyes were brighter to-day, and he was more restless than usual; he wanted to go out into the garden and sit in his accustomed seat on the lawn. It was such a perfect May day that no wonder he wanted to get out of that dark, gloomy old room, with the stuffy moreen curtains over the windows, and the faded carpets, and the worm-eaten, old-fashioned furniture, and the musty old books, into the sweet summer sunshine, where everything was fresh and new.