“If I hadn’t stayed so long at that confounded privy-window, I should have got out of Pimpernel’s before she came in. And if I’d stopped to say goodbye to Gerda, she’d have gone before I got there at all. Damn! It’s like the rope, the water, the fire, the dog, and the old woman getting home from market.”

When his class was let out and he himself escaped into the street at half-past twelve, it occurred to him that it was curious how faint an impact upon his consciousness this business of teaching history made. He was clever enough to do the whole job with the surface of his mind. “What the devil do those boys think of me?” he wondered grimly. “I forget their existence as soon as I’m out of sight of them.”

He met Darnley Otter, at that moment, issuing forth from his Latin lesson with a pile of papers in his hand.

Darnley greeted him with more than his usual cordiality; and as Wolf looked into his friend’s strangely-coloured eyes, he felt that peculiar sensation of relief which men are wont to feel when they encounter each other after the confusion of sex-conflicts.