Lucy feebly protested that she didn't expect Miss Stubbs to make a martyr of herself, and that she had no intention of being ill, but Maria was not so easily appeased.
'It isn't as if it were an examination,' she said in an aggrieved tone; 'then we could understand it. There'd be an excuse for a girl making an idiot of herself if she had been ploughed in an exam. I've known a girl refuse to eat anything for a week, because she failed twice in her additionals; and another girl—but this was a more serious case; her mind gave way quite on the last day of the exam., and she had to be sent to an asylum. I shouldn't be at all surprised if they were to send you to——'
'Not to the asylum!' said Lucy, in a sudden fright.
She was so bewildered she felt very much like going there already.
'I didn't mean that, silly!' Miss Stubbs said scornfully. 'I was going to say the infirmary. If you will go and get influenza, you can't expect to stay among people who are going in for examinations. Suppose I were to catch it—or Assurance! I'm not sure that Assurance hasn't caught something already. She begins her Tripos on Monday, and she's about as amiable as a bear.'
Maria Stubbs went back to her work—she was going to be shut up four hours in a laboratory among delightful smells—but before she went she made Lucy promise that she would ask the housekeeper to give her some breakfast.
Later in the day Lucy went over to the lodge to see the Master. The wind had gone down, but a gray mist hung over everything, and the trees were no longer rustling their leaves overhead. The branches were drooping with their own weight, and the leaves were limp, and dropping slow tears upon her as she passed beneath.
The Master was better to-day, decidedly better. He had slept several hours during the night, and he looked quite himself, Lucy thought, when she went into the room and saw him propped up in his chair. He was up and dressed; he had insisted on being dressed; they could not keep him in bed; and his chair was wheeled over to the window, where he sat looking out on to the river, and the path beneath the trees where an old, old philosopher used to walk long ago.
He had always loved that path by the river-side. It had been his favourite walk once. Perhaps the old associations had something to do with it; they have with most of the things men value in Cambridge. A great past seems to meet one at every college gate. Every inch of ground has its own sacred memories, and the path beneath the trees had echoed to the tread of generations of poets, sages, and scholars since the old philosopher walked there.
But it was not of the philosopher that the Master dreamed, as he sat looking out on the gray path and the blurred river. It was no longer the Cam he saw; it was the babbling trout-stream that ran by his father's farm—the gray shallow river that skirted the meadows, and swept beneath the arches of the old bridge, and roared in a torrent over the weirs.