Nevertheless, for four days and some hours after Mr. Bonover’s Hint, Mr. Lewisham so far observed its implications as to abandon open-air study and struggle with diminishing success to observe the spirit as well as the letter of his time-table prescriptions. For the most part he fretted at accumulating tasks, did them with slipshod energy or looked out of window. The Career constituent insisted that to meet and talk to this girl again meant reproof, worry, interference with his work for his matriculation, the destruction of all “Discipline,” and he saw the entire justice of the insistence. It was nonsense this being in love; there wasn’t such a thing as love outside of trashy novelettes. And forthwith his mind went off at a tangent to her eyes under the shadow of her hat brim, and had to be lugged back by main force. On Thursday when he was returning from school he saw her far away down the street, and hurried in to avoid her, looking ostentatiously in the opposite direction. But that was a turning-point. Shame overtook him. On Friday his belief in love was warm and living again, and his heart full of remorse for laggard days.
On Saturday morning his preoccupation with her was so vivid that it distracted him even while he was teaching that most teachable subject, algebra, and by the end of the school hours the issue was decided and the Career in headlong rout. That afternoon he would go, whatever happened, and see her and speak to her again. The thought of Bonover arose only to be dismissed. And besides—
Bonover took a siesta early in the afternoon.
Yes, he would go out and find her and speak to her. Nothing should stop him.
Once that decision was taken his imagination became riotous with things he might say, attitudes he might strike, and a multitude of vague fine dreams about her. He would say this, he would say that, his mind would do nothing but circle round this wonderful pose of lover. What a cur he had been to hide from her so long! What could he have been thinking about? How could he explain it to her, when the meeting really came? Suppose he was very frank—
He considered the limits of frankness. Would she believe he had not seen her on Thursday?—if he assured her that it was so?
And, most horrible, in the midst of all this came Bonover with a request that he would take “duty” in the cricket field instead of Dunkerley that afternoon. Dunkerley was the senior assistant master, Lewisham’s sole colleague. The last vestige of disapprobation had vanished from Bonover’s manner; asking a favour was his autocratic way of proffering the olive branch. But it came to Lewisham as a cruel imposition. For a fateful moment he trembled on the brink of acquiescence. In a flash came a vision of the long duty of the afternoon—she possibly packing for Clapham all the while. He turned white. Mr. Bonover watched his face.
“No,” said Lewisham bluntly, saying all he was sure of, and forthwith racking his unpractised mind for an excuse. “I’m sorry I can’t oblige you, but ... my arrangements ... I’ve made arrangements, in fact, for the afternoon.”
Mr. Bonover’s eyebrows went up at this obvious lie, and the glow of his suavity faded, “You see,” he said, “Mrs. Bonover expects a friend this afternoon, and we rather want Mr. Dunkerley to make four at croquet....”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Lewisham, still resolute, and making a mental note that Bonover would be playing croquet.