Page:Love and Mr. Lewisham – Wells (1899).djvu/32

20 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. "I would like to have it."

She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but his excitement was now too great for smiling. "Look here!" she said, and displayed the sheet crumpled into a ball. She laughed—with a touch of effort.

"I don't mind that," said Mr. Lewisham laughing