CHAPTER XV. THE TOUCH OF NATURE
A sense, when first I fronted him, Said, “Trust him not!”
After successfully carrying through the purchase of mourning stationery and attending to other important items connected with sorrow in its worldly shape, Arthur Agar went back to Cambridge. There was enough of the woman in his nature to enable him to cherish grief and nurse it lovingly, as some women (not the best of them) do. In this attitude towards the world there was none of that dogged going about his business which characterises the ordinary man from whose life something has slipped out.
He wandered by the banks of the Cam with mourning in his mien, and his cherished friends took sympathetic coffee with him after Hall. They spoke of Jem with that fervid admiration which University men honestly feel for one a few years their senior who has already “done something.”
“A ripping soldier” they called him and some of them entertained serious doubts as to whether they had done wisely in choosing the less glorious paths of peace. And Arthur Agar settled down into the old profitless life, with this difference—that he could not dine out, that he used blackedged notepaper, and that his delicate heliotrope neckties were folded away in a drawer until such time as his grief should be assuaged into that state of resignation technically called half-mourning.
One afternoon well towards the end of the term Arthur Agar's “gyp” crept in with that valet-like confidential air which seems to be bred of too intimate a knowledge of the extent of one's wardrobe.
“There is a gentleman, sir,” he said, “as wants to see you. But in no wise will he give his name, which, he says, you don't know it.”
“Is he selling engravings?” asked Arthur.
The “gyp” looked mildly offended. As if he didn't know that sort!