“It was beastly, though,--wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam behind him. “What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising, were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events. To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good man,”--that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order, Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,--Haydock imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to rectifying other people’s mistakes--he made very few himself--was quite at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible. This Haydock attempted to do. But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year. Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer before:-- “Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?” Haydock had asked him.