Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/44

 made life trying. A moment's wait and he was shown into an even safer haven, dangerously safe,—a library of mulberry and silver, brightened by flowers and hushed by silky rugs. Sophie Scantleberry held out a white arm to him and cleared a place at her side on a big sofa in which she was buried to the eyes, her high-arched slippers tucked under her.

"How nice of you to drop in! I passed your Hall this morning—light me one too—and almost sent a note in, asking you to come to lunch with me, but I was afraid of interrupting your solemn labors and knew you would be far too polite to send back word that I was to go to the devil, as you should have done if I had—do have some tea. See where I burned myself on that wretched spirit lamp because nobody was here to squunch it for me—"

Grover was tongue-tied, for as he leaned timidly forward to examine the pink mark on Sophie's finger, his nostrils were filled with the faint perfume he had smelt earlier in the afternoon,—the fragrance of an unknown flower which had had no locus, except, apparently, in memory!

A velvety breeze seemed to blow the sunlight into the classroom where sixty or eighty young men in bent damp and anxious brows over an examination on Shakespeare's plays: sixty or eighty potential voters and patres familiarum, thought Grover,