He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a
passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination
fever had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet
towels round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the
term, now strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.
On the Monday, John Lefolle was good-naturedly giving a special
audience to a muscular dunce, trying to explain to him the political
effects of the Crusades, when there was a knock at the sitting-room
door, and the scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly
dressed in white, and stood in the open doorway, smiling--an
embodiment of the summer he was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue
was paralysed. The dunce became suddenly important--a symbol of the
decorum he had been outraging. His soul, torn so abruptly from history
to romance, could not get up the right emotion. Why this imprudence of
Winifred's? She had been so careful heretofore.
"What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!" she said gaily.
He laughed. The spell was broken. "Yes, the heap to be cleaned is
rather obtrusive," he said, "but I suppose it is a sort of tradition."
"I think I've got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir." The dunce
rose and smiled, and his tutor realised how little the dunce had to
learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.
"Oh, well, you'll come and see me again after lunch, won't you, if one
or two points occur to you for elucidation," he said, feeling vaguely
a liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce,
Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of
the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for
an instant. He had scarcely time to realise that this wonderful thing
had happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves
and was examining a Thucydides upside down.
"How clever to know Greek!" she exclaimed. "And do you really talk it
with the other dons?"
"No, we never talk shop," he laughed. "But, Winifred, what made you
come here?"
"I had never seen Oxford. Isn't it beautiful?"
"There's nothing beautiful _here_," he said, looking round his sober
study.
"No," she admitted; "there's nothing I care for here," and had left
another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. "And now you
must take me to lunch and on the river."