"Mr. Jukes tells me you will be having a trial with the first team soon."
Mr. Jukes had told Miss Foldal nothing of the kind. She was the last person to whom he would have made any such confidence.
"Oh no, miss." The native modesty was pleasant in her ear. "I'm nothing near good enough yet."
"It will come, though. It is bound to come."
The young man was not stirred by this prophecy. His mind had gone back to the night school; it was tormenting itself with the problem ever before it now. He would have liked to bring the conversation round to the matter, if only it could be done without disclosing the deadly secret. But the memory of Mrs. Sparks was still fresh. There was no denying that for a chap of nineteen not to have the elements of the three r's was a disgrace; it was bound to prejudice him in the eyes of a lady of education.
Still, Miss Foldal was not Mrs. Sparks. Being a higher sort of lady perhaps she would be able to make allowances. Yet Henry Harper didn't want her or anyone else to make allowances. However, he could not afford to be proud.
Chance it, suddenly decreed the voice within. She won't eat you anyway.
XV
Miss Foldal, it seemed, had been trained in her youth for a board school teacher. In a brief flash of autobiography, she told Mr. Harper she had never really graduated in that trying profession, but had forsaken a career eminently honorable for the more doubtful one of the stage, and had spent the rest of her life in regretting it. But always at the back of her mind was the sense of her original calling to leaven the years of her later fall from grace.