She
held out her hand. No doubt that was the proper thing to do. He took
it, searching a void, tumultuous mind in vain.
"It's awfully kind of you," she said again as she did so.
"It don't matter a bit," said Mr. Lewisham, and sought vainly for some
other saying, some doorway remark into new topics. Her hand was cool
and soft and firm, the most delightful thing to grasp, and this
observation ousted all other things. He held it for a moment, but
nothing would come.
They discovered themselves hand in hand. They both laughed and felt
"silly." They shook hands in the manner of quite intimate friends, and
snatched their hands away awkwardly. She turned, glanced timidly at
him over her shoulder, and hesitated. "Good-bye," she said, and was
suddenly walking from him.
He bowed to her receding back, made a seventeenth-century sweep with
his college cap, and then some hitherto unexplored regions of his mind
flashed into revolt.
Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.
"I say," he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his
mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral. "But that
sheet of paper ..."
"Yes," she said surprised--quite naturally.
"May I have it?"
"Why?"
He felt a breathless pleasure, like that of sliding down a slope of
snow.
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