Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/286

 "I don't know. He wanted to, and I let him."

"I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a novelty."

They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court of an omniscient judge he might have entered on his notes the curious fact that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not said a word about the kiss.

After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers. She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition, and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock. Entering their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene. He was musing. "I think," he said at last, without turning his head, "that I must get the Committee to change the school stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."

There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing, he went on:

"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully, and gives me the earache."

As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily, he turned round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls up-stairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove's House," and the massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.