"Yes," I replied, compressing my lips.
And so we chatted. I forget what our other subjects were. I left her, with our first hand-shake, at her door.
What that week-end was to me I will not attempt to tell you. I did not belong to this earth at all. The fact that actually, in her person, she was enjoying herself in Archie's company at Guildford was nothing to me; the fact that every fibre of me was rapturously tremulous at the thought of her was everything. I triumphed as if I already had her yielding in my arms. Archie?... In my possession I laughed. I even felt kindly to Archie—felt towards him that it would give me pleasure to have him, by-and-by, a quite frequent visitor at my house—our house.... I spread the mantle of my exaltation over the draymen and porters of the place where I dined. Their heavens were not mine, but if a man is full he is full, and I allowed them sanctities of their own. My heart was soft and generous to them. For the first time in my life I knew what folk mean when they say they love all the world.
The sweet influence had not quite left me when on Monday night I went to the college to see her again.
She did not appear that night. Neither did he.
It was Wednesday before I saw her again.
I do not know what damnable difference in me that absence of the pair of them for a single evening made. It came over me so suddenly that I was in its clutches before I was aware. It was a significant transformation. Let me relate it.
I knocked at the brass knocker of Archie's ivy-green door an hour before the class on the Tuesday night, and found that he intended to work at home that evening. (I only learned this, however, some minutes later.) I had had a double reason for calling on him at that hour, and the blood comes hot again in my cheeks as I recall my second reason. I had recently bought a new suit of clothes, not in Lamb's Conduit Street, but made, though cheaply enough, to measure; and though it was only the beginning of the week one of the payments for this suit had already depleted my pocket almost to the last penny. Since breakfast that day I had not eaten. But I knew the hour at which Archie dined.
So nicely had I hit the moment for my self-invitation that I actually followed his hot dinner half-way up the stairs. It was only on the first landing that the servant stood aside with the tray to allow me to precede her. I knocked at his door and entered, leaving the door open for the dinner of which I intended to partake to follow.
He had brought a fowl back with him from Guildford, with one or two other motherly gifts, and I smelt the white sauce even before Jane put the tray down on a side table. Archie was in his brown dressing-gown, standing before his fire. He had taken the green shade from his lamp, and his low-ceilinged roof-chamber looked exceedingly ruddy and comfortable and home-like.