By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic songs at "smokers," and a frequent looker-in at the shilling dances at the Holburn Town Hall after class. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pass that he was cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his mind.
"It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!" he exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of modern examinations is true). "Kitty Windus says she'll eat her mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos."
I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of Mackie's "Flor" reached her, and then a little way back again as she caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper again.
"All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!" he said, with regret for the time he had lost. "I wouldn't have dropped out of the billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular John Roberts--in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier when teacher says we can go."
But suddenly he stopped his rapid flow. He made a slight movement with his finger, and stood listening. I heard nothing except the voices lower down the stairs and the general hum in the room we had just left. But Mackie did.
I told you how the wooden partition at the head of the stairs, that with the small window high up, separated the landing on which we stood from the old ledger-room. The window was worked with cords on a horizontal pivot, and was swung partly open. Whether Mackie heard whatever he did hear through this window or through the boards themselves I do not know, but a smile came over his face.