And I was alone--Archie at Guildford, Evie and her aunt I didn't know where, perhaps at Guildford too, everybody with homes to go to and faces to talk to over a fire. Archie's absence, too, cost me several sixpences--the price of the hot baths I could not very well ask for at his quarters while he was away. I spent my evenings in the Patent Office Library, where it was warm.
I was glad when Christmas was over. I felt somehow that I was not missing quite so much.
Then those who had been away for a holiday came back; the second and third weeks of January passed; and on the twenty-first, a Monday, I went to the college again, as piteously joyful as if I had been an outcast returning to open and welcoming arms again.
There were changes at the college. New students had come, several of the old ones had left, among them Mackie, whose course was finished, and we had a new "professor," who, it was said, was to start an advertisement-writing class. But the biggest gap seemed to be left by Miss Levey and Miss Causton, neither of whom, in spite of their answers to my question at the breaking-up party, had returned. Miss Levey, indeed was not returning; she had got a job; and I do not conceal that this was a small relief to me. It put an end to the hints and guessings and pertinacities that might still further have embarrassed my not very clearly explained situation. But Miss Causton, I gathered, had merely not come back yet. As it turned out later, she did not come back. But nobody knew yet. So, until she should do so, Evie and Miss Windus remained our only two woman students.
It is plain that I had had to think out a plausible reason for my own return. I neither wished, nor would it have been credible of me, to be regarded as one of those high-and-dry relics (every college and school has them) who wear on to middle age seeing whole generations of juniors out, and become pathetic "institutions" merely because they had not initiative to stop doing what they have once begun. So I had hit on an explanation of my reappearance that, as it subsequently turned out, cut two ways. In one of these ways it proved magnificently sufficient for me; in the other it proved inadequate with an inadequacy that I only partly rectified when I became engaged to Miss Windus. In a word, I had had an idea.