Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

Presently, after a last look round, she went up the creaking stairs, to do Mr. Noaks’ room. She found on the table that screed which her mother had recited so often this evening. She put it in the waste-paper basket. Also on the table were a lexicon, a Thucydides, and some note-books. These she took and shelved without a tear for the closed labours they bore witness to. The next disorder that met her eye was one that gave her pause--seemed, indeed, to transfix her. Mr. Noaks had never, since he came to lodge here, possessed more than one pair of boots. This fact had been for her a lasting source of annoyance; for it meant that she had to polish Mr. Noaks’ boots always in the early morning, when there were so many other things to be done, instead of choosing her own time. Her annoyance had been all the keener because Mr. Noaks’ boots more than made up in size for what they lacked in number. Either of them singly took more time and polish than any other pair imaginable. She would have recognised them, at a glance, anywhere. Even so now, it was at a glance that she recognised the toes of them protruding from beneath the window-curtain. She dismissed the theory that Mr. Noaks might have gone utterly unshod to the river. She scouted the hypothesis that his ghost could be shod thus. By process of elimination she arrived at the truth. “Mr. Noaks,” she said quietly, “come out of there.”