"If," said the professor, deliberately,—"if she were not free to give what his feeling for her demanded."
He paused to turn Tredennis round.
"Confound him!" he said, with a curiously irritable seriousness. "If he once reached a white heat,—that fellow with his objectless follies, and his dress-coat, and his white necktie, and his opera hat under his arm,—if he once forgot them and himself, it would be her fate to remember him as long as her life should last."
"Her fate?" said Tredennis.
"I said it would have to be a woman," said the professor. "I should not like it to be a woman I felt an interest in. We have reached the end of the block. Let us walk back again."
When he spoke again it was of Richard Armory, not of Arbuthnot.
"You went upstairs into the Museum, as Bertha calls it?" he said.
"Yes," answered Tredennis; "and into the workroom."
"And saw the models, and the collections, and the books?"
"Yes."