And he said some fine brave things.
He found the little old lady of the wallflowers with a candle in her
window, and drank a bottle of ginger beer with a sacramental air. The
little old lady asked him, a trifle archly, after his sister, and he
promised to bring her again some day. "I'll certainly bring her," he
said. Talking to the little old lady somehow blunted his sense of
desolation. And then home through the white indistinctness in a state
of melancholy that became at last so fine as to be almost pleasurable.
The day after that mood a new "text" attracted and perplexed
Mrs. Munday, an inscription at once mysterious and familiar, and this
inscription was:
Mizpah.
It was in Old English lettering and evidently very carefully executed.
Where had she seen it before?
It quite dominated all the rest of the room at first, it flaunted like
a flag of triumph over "discipline" and the time-table and the
Schema. Once indeed it was taken down, but the day after it
reappeared. Later a list of scholastic vacancies partially obscured
it, and some pencil memoranda were written on the margin.
And when at last the time came for him to pack up and leave Whortley,
he took it down and used it with several other suitable papers--the
Schema and the time-table were its next-door neighbours--to line the
bottom of the yellow box in which he packed his books: chiefly books
for that matriculation that had now to be postponed.
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