'Goodness gracious,' she cried, 'how late it is!'
'Oh, you're not leaving me yet!' he said. A world of things sprang to
his brain, things that he was going to say--to arrange. They had said
nothing--not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.
'Poet!' she laughed. 'Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?' She
picked up her parasol.
'Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be raving at his lonely
dinner-table.'
He was so dazed as to be surprised when the waitress blocked his
departure with a bill. When Winifred was spirited away, he remembered
she might, without much risk, have given him a lift to Paddington. He
hailed another hansom and caught the next train to Oxford. But he was
too late for his own dinner in Hall.
III
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.
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