And it does not resume with Ethel at all. For that promised second
letter never reached him, and though he spent many an afternoon during
his first few months in London wandering about Clapham, that arid
waste of people, the meeting that he longed for never came. Until at
last, after the manner of youth, so gloriously recuperative in body,
heart, and soul, he began to forget.

The quest of a "crib" had ended in the unexpected fruition of
Dunkerley's blue paper. The green-blue certificates had, it seemed, a
value beyond mural decoration, and when Lewisham was already
despairing of any employment for the rest of his life, came a
marvellous blue document from the Education Department promising
inconceivable things. He was to go to London and be paid a guinea a
week for listening to lectures--lectures beyond his most ambitious
dreams! Among the names that swam before his eyes was Huxley--Huxley
and then Lockyer! What a chance to get! Is it any wonder that for
three memorable years the Career prevailed with him?

You figure him on his way to the Normal School of Science at the
opening of his third year of study there. (They call the place the
Royal College of Science in these latter days.) He carried in his
right hand a shiny black bag, well stuffed with text-books, notes, and
apparatus for the, forthcoming session; and in his left was a book
that the bag had no place for, a book with gilt edges, and its binding
very carefully protected by a brown paper cover.

The lapse of time had asserted itself upon his upper lip in an
inaggressive but indisputable moustache, in an added inch or so of
stature, and in his less conscious carriage. For he no longer felt
that universal attention he believed in at eighteen; it was beginning