‘The room was so hot,’ she said apologetically to the librarian, who had wakened her and seemed more perturbed about her drowsiness than need be. ‘You are overworking,’ he answered, with a sharpness in his voice. ‘You will have to give it up, or have a nervous breakdown.’ She forgot to wonder at the something like anger in his voice. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ she said, ‘so near the exam.! Afterwards, I shall take a good rest. I shall read nothing but novels for a month.’ ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘There are cobwebs here that get into people’s brains. Look at Miss Brooke! You must go away into the country and not touch a book. The Spring will be here soon. Although it is wet to-night there is a west wind that brings the fields.’ ‘I must get through my exam. first,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, I dare say it will be best for me.’ ‘You will break down before,’ he replied gloomily, and she was frightened. There came a few fine, beautiful days, when she went out and wandered in country lanes and by the sea. The librarian was taking a holiday at this time and sometimes she encountered him, and they walked together and returned to town together. The larks were singing by this time, and here and there in the fields there was a daisy. There were authentic tidings of spring blown down from the mountains and in from the fields and woods. She had listened at last to the librarian—their intimacy had grown in those country walks—and had consented to lay aside her work till the eve of the studentship exam., because she felt that she was going to fail if she stuck at it. But he could not know, she said to herself, the strain it was upon her to keep away from her work in the reading-room. She had been so happy there. There was something missing even in the fields and by the sea. A week passed, and one evening she dined alone, her mother and Bobby having gone to a theatre. Her dinner was but a pretence. She remembered that the ladies’ reading-room was open till nine o’clock. It tempted her like a forbidden fruit. She could get in an hour’s work there while they were at the theatre. Her heart began to beat hard as the thought came to her of the walk through the wet streets, the lit windows of the great house beyond the courtyard, the hall through which she would pass so quickly, the stairs, the narrow corridor between the books. Then the ladies’ reading-room, so good after the cheerless street, its fire, the brown books with their flash of gilding, Miss Brooke sitting by the fire, the portrait—it would flash a look of welcome as she came in, wondering why she had stayed away so long. She loved her work, and she had missed it. It was lucky Mr. Tyrrell was out of town or he might have called, as he had called once or twice lately, with a book or some other pretext for coming, and had hindered her. The rest had done her good. It was so good to be getting back to work, to be so keen.