"Serve you right if
the university were to chuck you into the Thames." And with this comment
they left him to his ill temper. One remained; sat quietly down a little
way off, struck a sweetly aromatic lucifer, and blew a noisome cloud; but
the only one which betokens calm.
As for Hardie, he held his aching head over his knees, absorbed in pain,
and quite unconscious that sacred pity was poisoning the air beside him,
and two pair of dovelike eyes resting on him with womanly concern.
Mrs. Dodd and Julia had heard the greatest part of this colloquy. They
had terribly quick ears and nothing better to do with them just then.
Indeed, their interest was excited.
Julia went so far as to put her salts into Mrs. Dodd's hand with a little
earnest look. But Mrs. Dodd did not act upon the hint. She had learned
who the young man was: had his very name been strange to her, she would
have been more at her ease with him. Moreover, his rudeness to the other
men repelled her a little. Above all, he had uttered a monosyllable and a
stinger: a thorn of speech not in her vocabulary, nor even in society's.
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