Peter Tourmalin's probation was at an end, and, what was more, he had come through the ordeal triumphantly. How he managed this, he scarcely knew; no doubt he was aided by the consciousness that the extra hours which he felt himself most liable to mis-spend had been placed beyond his disposal. At all events, when he met Sophia again, he had been able to convince her that her doubts of his constancy, even under the most trying conditions, were entirely undeserved. Now he was receiving his recompense: his engagement to Sophia was no longer conditional, but a recognised and irrevocable fact. It is superfluous to say that he was happy. Sophia had set herself to repair the deficiencies in his education and culture; she took him to scientific lectures and classical concerts, and made him read standard authors without skipping. He felt himself daily acquiring balance and seriousness, and an accurate habit of thought, and all the other qualities which Sophia wished him to cultivate.
Still, there were moments when he felt the need of halting and recovering his wind, so to speak, in the steep and toilsome climb to her superior mental level--times when he felt that his overtaxed brain absolutely required relaxation of some sort.
He felt this particularly one dreary morning, late in November, as he sat in his London chambers, staring with lack-lustre eyes at the letter he had that day received from his betrothed. For although they met nearly every day, she never allowed one to pass without a letter--no fond and foolish effusion, be it understood, but a kind of epistolary examination-paper, to test the progress he was making. This one contained some searching questions on Buckle's _History of Civilisation_, which he was expected to answer by return of post. He was not supposed to look at the book, though he had; and even then he felt himself scarcely better fitted to floor the tremendous posers devised by Sophia's unwearying care.
The day before, he had had "search-questions" in English poetry from Chaucer to Mr. Lewis Morris, which had thinned and whitened his hair; but this was, if possible, even worse.
He wished now that he had got up his Buckle more thoroughly during his voyage on the _Boomerang_--and, with the name, his arrangement with the Manager suddenly rose to his recollection. What had he done with that book of Time Cheques? If he could only get away, if but for a quarter of a hour--away from those sombre rooms, with their outlook on dingy housetops and a murky rhubarb-coloured sky,--if he could really exchange all that for the sunniness and warmth and delicious idleness which had once seemed so tedious, what a rest it would be! And would he not return after such an interlude with all his faculties invigorated, and better able to cope with the task he now found almost insuperable?