CHAPTER V. — HESITATIONS.
Mr. Bonover, having fully matured a Hint suitable for the occasion, dropped it in the afternoon, while Lewisham was superintending cricket practice. He made a few remarks about the prospects of the first eleven by way of introduction, and Lewisham agreed with him that Frobisher i. looked like shaping very well this season.
A pause followed and the headmaster hummed. “By-the-bye,” he said, as if making conversation and still watching the play; “I, ah,—understood that you, ah—were a stranger to Whortley.”
“Yes,” said Lewisham, “that’s so.”
“You have made friends in the neighbourhood?”
Lewisham was troubled with a cough, and his ears—those confounded ears—brightened, “Yes,” he said, recovering, “Oh yes. Yes, I have.”
“Local people, I presume.”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” The brightness spread from Lewisham’s ears over his face.
“I saw you,” said Bonover, “talking to a young lady in the avenue. Her face was somehow quite familiar to me. Who was she?”
Should he say she was a friend of the Frobishers? In that case Bonover, in his insidious amiable way, might talk to the Frobisher parents and make things disagreeable for her. “She was,” said Lewisham, flushing deeply with the stress on his honesty and dropping his voice to a mumble, “a ... a ... an old friend of my mother’s. In fact, I met her once at Salisbury.”