"It doesn't need any explanation. You either know it or don't know it. Apparently you don't know it.... And now, Mr. Speed, I'm afraid I'll have to go—I can't leave the boy to manage the shop by himself all morning."
Speed had the sensation that she was slightly out of patience with him.
II
Clare brought him to earth; his dreams crumpled when he was with her; his emotional outlook sagged, as it were, with the perhaps imagined pricklings of her shrewdness. He hated her, ever so slightly, because he felt sometimes between her and himself a subtle and secret hostility, a hostility in which, because of her cool imperturbability, she had all the advantage. But when he was not with her his imagination soared and flamed up higher than ever; it was a fire that Clare's temperament could only make sulky. Those final weeks of the summer term were glorious beyond words. He took Clanwell's advice to the extent of not meeting Helen on the school premises, but hardly a day passed without some wonderful and secret assignation; the two of them would arrange afternoon excursions together, picnics, at Parminters, strolls along the Millstead road at dusk. It was all deeply and inexpressibly lovely. He told her a great many of his own dreams and ambitions, making her share them with him; she kindled aptly to his own enthusiasms, readily as a child might have done. For he was certain that Clare was wrong in that: Helen was only a child. To marry her seemed a thing of almost unearthly delicacy; he found himself pitying her sometimes because of the future. Above all, that she should wish to marry him, that her love should be capable of such a solemn and ineffable desire, seemed to him nearly a miracle. "Fragile little thing!" he said to her once, as he kissed her—"I'm almost afraid of breaking you!"—She answered, in that wistful childlike voice that was perhaps incongruously sombre in tone: "Am I fragile?"
Once, towards dusk, they met the Head along the Millstead road. He raised his hat and passed them, muttering: "Taking an—um—stroll, Helen—um—beautiful evening—um, yes—good evening, Mr. Speed!"
He wore the air of being marvellously discreet.
III
Conversation at dinner in the Masters' Common-Room turned one evening upon Harrington. "Old Harrington's pretty bad again," Pritchard had said. "I heard in the town to-day that he'd had another stroke."
Speed, curiously startled by the utterance of the name, exclaimed "What, the Harringtons who keep the bookshop?—I didn't know he was ill."
"Been ill ever since I can remember," replied Pritchard, laconically.