THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 ENDOWED BY THE 
 
 DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
 
 SOCIETIES 
 
 PR4980 
 .M492 
 F4 
 1898 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 00014439020 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 ) 
 
 
 NOV 1 2 
 
 ? 011 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A. 
 
% 
 
i^^^jl^tei 
 
 " He fell fast asleep in his chair. 
 
 [ch. xx. 
 
I 
 
 A FELLOW OF TRINITY 
 
 ALAN St. AUBYN 
 
 | 
 
 M ■ 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE JUNIOR DEAN,' 'THE OLD MAID'S SWEETHEART.' 
 ' MODEST LITTLE SARA,' ETC. 
 
 A NEW EDITION 
 
 WITH A NOTE BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
 AND A FRONTISPIECE 
 
 LONDON 
 CHATTO & WINDUS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/fellowoftrinityOOstau 
 
TO 
 
 DE. OLIVEE WENDELL HOLMES 
 
 (WITH HIS VERT KIND PERMISSION) 
 THIS STORY OP UNIVERSITY LIFE — THE CHEQUERED, MANY- 
 SIDED STUDENT LIFE THAT HE HAS ASSOCIATED 
 WITH SO MANY GRACEFUL MEMORIES — 
 
 AS A LITTLE MEMENTO OF THAT OLDER CAMBRIDGE 
 
 WHERE, BY SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS OF 
 
 UNDERGRADUATES, HE IS 
 
 REGARDED WITH EVER-INCREASING 
 
 ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONAEII 
 II. IN STATU PUPILLARI - 
 III. THE BELLES OP CAMBRIDGE - 
 IV. 'GATED' - 
 
 V. DULCE DOMUM ! 
 VI. WAIT A MINCTE ! 
 fll. A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 
 VIII. MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE-DUNE-BY 
 IX. WILD OATS 
 X. THE BEDMAKER'S GHOST 
 XI. A STILL, SMALL VOICE 
 XII. BROWN PATRONUS 
 
 XIII. JULIE - 
 
 XIV. 'WHILE THE GRASS GROWS 1 - 
 XV. A PRETTY HORSE-BREAKER - 
 
 XVI. TOMMY'S LITTLE BROTHER - 
 XVII. MADAM JEZEBEL 
 XVIII. THE DEAN'S RING 
 XIX. A RUBY NECKLACE 
 
 XX. 'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION' 
 XXI. THE FOUNTAIN OP KING'S 
 XXII. AN UNREASONABLE ATTACHMENT 
 
 XXIII. THE MISSES BELLENDEN 
 
 XXIV. THE LENT RACES 
 XXV. AT ELY STATION 
 
 XXVI. THE WHITE FLOWER OP A BLAMELESS LIFE 
 
 1 
 12 
 21 
 
 27 
 
 34 
 
 41 
 
 48 
 
 60 
 
 70 
 
 76 
 
 82 
 
 91 
 
 100 
 
 105 
 
 111 
 
 118 
 
 124 
 
 131 
 
 141 
 
 149 
 
 160 
 
 166 
 
 172 
 
 180 
 
 192 
 
 198 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 xxvii. 'sparring' .--.„. 207 
 
 xxviii. brown of trinity - - - - - 216 
 
 xxix. a million of money- ..... 224 
 
 xxx. pistols for two - . - ~ 232 
 
 xxxi. a beneficent fairy •> 241 
 
 xxxii. the black book - 250 
 
 xxxiii. the story of the dean's ring ■ - 259 
 
 xxxiv. spurway's confession - 267 
 
 xxxv. success ...... 274 
 
 xxxvi. nemesis -..,,.. 280 
 
 XXXVH A FELLOW OF TRINITY • • - ■ 290 
 
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONARIL 
 
 ' The many fail ; the one succeeds.' 
 
 The story of Ernest Flowers' failures and successes is a very brief 
 one. It has not even the charm of novelty. It is a story as old as 
 the hills. The old foolish story of an early — ridiculously -early — 
 improvident marriage, of a short spasm of unutterable happiness, 
 of limited means, and failing health ; of failure, disappointment, 
 and death. 
 
 Ernesti Flowers, pensionarii, as he was described in the books of 
 Christ's College, was an impressionable undergraduate, in his first 
 year, when he committed the crowning indiscretion of his life and 
 married his tutor's daughter. 
 
 Not the daughter of his college tutor, the learned and eminent 
 divine, senior tutor and Fellow of Christ's, but a very humble 
 1 twig ' of that honourable profession, a poor seedy, broken-down 
 old coach, who eked out a slender income by preparing pupils for 
 the University. 
 
 He prepared Ernest, only son of that much-respected medical 
 practitioner, the late Herbert Flowers, M.R.C.S., of Bideford in 
 North Devon ; and when his hopeful pupil ought to have been 
 attending to his studies, that idle and improvident youth was 
 falling deeper and deeper in love with his little daughter. 
 
 If any excuse could be found for such an unprecedented act of 
 folly, Lucy herself was the excuse — quite a sufficient excuse. 
 
 The consequence of this folly was that Ernest Flowers went up 
 to Cambridge wholly unprepared for the serious work that lay 
 before him there. 
 
 He was plucked, to begin with, in the first part of the Little-G-o, 
 when he went up in the October term, so he discreetly put that 
 aside and prepared for the second part, which he took in the 
 December following, and in that also he failed. 
 
 i 
 
2 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 He was persevering, if he were not a genius, and he went back 
 to his old coach, and plodded on through the Christmas vacation, 
 falling deeper and deeper in love every day — and he was quite 
 deep enough already — with his coach's pretty daughter. 
 
 When he presented himself in June, for the second time, for 
 examination in that unhappy Part I. of the Previous, there were 
 quite sufficient reasons to account for his second failure. Lucy's 
 father was dead. 
 
 The old coach had suddenly broken up ; gone to pieces in a day, 
 like the Deacon's wonderful masterpiece. Like ifc, there had been 
 in the worn-out old coach's constitution through the long winter a 
 general flavour of mild decay, and when spring came, and the 
 flowers were pushing up through the warm earth, and the sunshine 
 that he loved was streaming in through his narrow windows, the 
 poor scholar took his last degree ; and the old coach went suddenly 
 to pieces, wheels and all. 
 
 There was so little left for poor Lucy to begin the world upon ; 
 and that little of so unavailable a character, from a female point 
 of view — a seedy old scholar's wardrobe (a ragged, threadbare M.A. 
 gown, which the deceased coach wore to the last, being the principal 
 item), a bookshelf, full of musty old classics, some worn, shabby 
 furniture, and a massive silver inkstand. 
 
 This last — Lucy's dowry — had been given to the old scholar 
 years ago by the Fellows of his college, when he had married and 
 given up his fellowship, and it bore an inscription in Latin, and the 
 arms of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 It was no wonder that the impressionable undergraduate failed 
 in his examination, and was ignominiously sent down by the stoniest- 
 hearted of tutors, when this tender creature was, by one cruel 
 stroke of Fate, turned adrift upon the wide world. 
 
 Homeless and an orphan ! 
 
 It made him quite shiver to think of it, as he went up to the 
 Senate House, in the June sunshine, to that unlucky exam. 
 
 Not exactly a cold shiver. 
 
 He thought of it all the time the exam, was on, when he ought 
 to have been thinking of something else. It got between him and 
 his papers, and mixed itself up, in a most unaccountable manner, 
 with the Odes of Horace, and the Latin and Greek Accidence — 
 this bewildering idea, that the girl he loved was homeless and an 
 orphan ! 
 
 He quite made up his mind, during that memorable examina- 
 tion, and came away from it blushing and as happy a man as if he 
 had scored the highest success of his year. No wonder his tutor 
 sent him down ! 
 
 It was no use for Lucy to say that she was going out as a 
 governess. 
 
 She couldn't possibly take that library of musty old books with 
 her, to say nothing of the shabby furniture, and the silver inkstand 
 
ERNESTI FLOWERS, PEHsiuisaRII. 3 
 
 Ernest Flowers put the matter so strongly before her, and he 
 fc T as so very much in earnest, having settled everything quite 
 satisfactorily during the examination, that Lucy's obstacles were 
 all swept away, and — they were married. 
 
 What was it to that supremely blessed undergraduate, that at 
 the end of his first year he had failed successively in all his 
 University examinations, and had not even passed one part of the 
 Little-Go : had he not won the 'consolation cup' — Love — which 
 Fortune keeps for those who are beaten in the race ? 
 
 He was outrageously happy, and not at all sorry that he was sent 
 down for a term. It would prolong the honeymoon. 
 
 The honeymoon could hardly be said to be over when Ernest 
 Flowers and his bride came up to Cambridge the following year, 
 and settled in delightful lodgings just outside the college walls. 
 
 It had been the happiest time ; but it had drawbacks which a 
 youthful bridegroom seldom allows himself to consider — it had cost 
 a great deal of money. 
 
 All things are relative, and what would have been economy to 
 most men was rank extravagance to Ernest Flowers, with his 
 slender patrimony. With added responsibilites, present and in the 
 future, it behoved him to return to his work with renewed diligence, 
 and to prepare seriously for the Church. 
 
 He applied ^himself so well to his studies with this delightful 
 stimulus, that in the examination in the following December he 
 passed successfully the two parts of the long delayed Little-Go. 
 
 It was the proudest and happiest day of the poor student's life 
 when his Little-Wine-Go came off late in December. 
 
 It was the darkest and dreariest day of the whole year, and the 
 shortest. But it was the longest, and brightest, and most delight- 
 ful day that ever dawned on this unsympathetic globe to Ernest 
 Flowers, for an unbidden guest had dropped in to join his Little- 
 Wine-Go, and lay sleeping on Lucy's bosom. 
 
 It was a wonderful baby ! apart from its pinkness, and roundness, 
 and general suggestiveness of crumpled rose-leaves, which belong 
 to babies in general. A grave, thoughtful baby, much given to 
 solemn retrospection or anticipation — which ? — as it lay, self- 
 absorbed, with that magnificent indifference to outside things 
 which is only possible to babies. 
 
 Foolish little Lucy, looking down with fond eyes upon the 
 round pink face, so preternaturally grave, expressed her strong 
 maternal conviction that in coming into the world this mite of a 
 philosopher had forgotten something and was always trying to 
 remember it. Perhaps it had ? 
 
 The duty to provide for this addition to his household pressed so 
 heavily on Ernest Flowers that he applied himself with so much 
 vigour to his studies that before the term was over his health was 
 completely broken down. He could do but little reading the next 
 term, and the consequence was he was plucked in his 'General,' 
 
 1—2 
 
4 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 and for the second time in his chequered University career wa? 
 *sent down.' 
 
 Things were looking serious. That slender patrimony that 
 Ernest Flowers depended upon, like the widow's cruse, to last out 
 until he was safely landed in the bosom of the Church, was 
 diminishing rapidly. 
 
 The cruse, indeed, was nearly spent, and he was no nearer the 
 Church than ever. 
 
 Disheartened and out of health, the poor scholar took his 
 precious belongings and went back to his native place in the sweet 
 West Country. The air of his native hills, the wholesome breath 
 of the salt sea, the quiet, the rest, and the delicious repose of those 
 blissful months, restored his wasted strength, and he began afresh 
 to read for the dreaded examination. 
 
 New subjects had to be read and new ground broken, but the 
 dear beacon at his hearth cheered him through all this uncongenial 
 toil. 
 
 What is a pleasure to most men was a heavy burden to the 
 humble student, plodding wearily on alone and unaided. 
 
 He went up at Christmas to be examined once more for the 
 ' General,' and — failed in one paper. 
 
 It was enough to dishearten the strongest. But he had still the 
 ( consolation cup,' that Fortune had presented to him after his first 
 defeat, awaiting him. He had been cruelly braised and beaten in 
 the ring ; he had lost the race, and had won neither laurels nor 
 praise. He crept humbly back to his poor home, disheartened and 
 travel-worn, and bearing all the traces of defeat on his shamed 
 face. And, lo, his cup was brimming over ! 
 
 What is denied to most men was his without stint — full 
 measure, pressed down, and running over. 
 
 Surely there was no failure here. Does not Fortune, wise and 
 wonderful, for everything she withholds ever yield a richer 
 blessing ? 
 
 What is compensation, if not gain for every loss, and, alas, loss 
 for every gain ? 
 
 What was more to the point with the unsuccessful under- 
 graduate, who had other and dearer burdens to bear besides his 
 own, was the terribly significant fact that the cruse had nearly all 
 run out. 
 
 It had been a very humble cruse, to begin with, and it had been 
 poured out with a lavish hand in those early, thoughtless, honey- 
 moon days, and now it would only run drop by drop. 
 
 Something must be done. So the dear little cottage by the 
 Severn Sea was given up, and Ernest Flowers took a lay-readership 
 in a nasty smoky town in the Black Country, and conducted 
 services for an uncouth, unwashed population in a mission chapel. 
 
 The soot got down into his lungs, and the smoke choked him ; 
 but he plodded on bravely, with Lucy and her boy by his side, and 
 
ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONARII. 5 
 
 worked hard and read hard, employing all his spare time in reading 
 for his degree. 
 
 At the end of another twelvemonths he told himself he was 
 ready, and he went up to Cambridge once more to be examined ; 
 this time in tbe highest spirits and confident of success. 
 
 How can the rest be told, were it not that such things are 
 happening every day ? It had best be told briefly. 
 
 Ernest Flowers started for Cambridge, leaving his dear ones 
 among the smoke and soot, travelling third-class, by slow trains, 
 involving long waits in draughty stations in bitter winter 
 weather. 
 
 He caught a chill on the journey, and the day that the examina- 
 tion came off he was confined to his bed with pleurisy. 
 
 Lucy was sent for ; but meanwhile the hard, unsympathetic 
 college tutor, who had so repeatedly sent him down, came over to his 
 poor rooms and nursed him like a friend. 
 
 Like a friend ? Like a woman, rather, if tenderness and 
 thoughtful care and self-devotion alone are womanly. 
 
 He nursed him unremittingly, this kind friend, and when Lucy 
 came, shared her vigils ; but neither his care nor her love availed 
 to hold the worn-out scholar back when the summons came, and it 
 came suddenly, to a higher examination, which many more gifted 
 may be unable to pass as well. 
 
 It was the morning of the day when the degrees were conferred, 
 and when the college tutor came back from the Senate House, after 
 the congregation was over, where, as Prselector, he had presented 
 to the Yice-Chancellor the men who had passed through their 
 University course with honour, to receive the well-merited award, 
 the humble student he had left in the upper chamber had already 
 taken his degree before that Greater Senate where earthly judg- 
 ments are reversed. 
 
 They buried the humble student who had won neither fame nor 
 laurels, whose name would never be inscribed in golden letters on 
 any Honoris Causa, in the green churchyard of Grantchester, 
 where so much learned dust reposes. 
 
 His fellow -undergraduates raised, amid the lichen-encrusted 
 memorials of the wise and the great, a small white stone recording 
 the blameless life and the earnest piety of the unsuccessful scholar. 
 
 The lichens crept over it by-and-by, and the letters were all 
 filled up, and the dust beneath mingled with tbe learned dust of 
 eminent scholars, and the little upright stone fell aslant and sank 
 into the soft clayey soil, and the ivy covered it up, and his simple 
 memory, his failures and his successes, were very soon quite for- 
 gotten. 
 
 Lucy went away with her boy ; she had nowhere to go but to 
 her own little native town in the West-Country. So back she 
 came to Bideford in the raw January weather, leaving the poor 
 scholar, whose entire devotion had filled the cup of her innocent, 
 
6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 happiness to the brim, to be rained upon and snowed upon in the 
 green churchyard of Grantchester. 
 
 His devotion to his helpless child and wife had outlived the 
 slender thread of life. The dead hand that was powerless to guide 
 was still raised to bless. 
 
 Not an empty blessing ! 
 
 In his health and prosperity Ernest Flowers had, with tender 
 forethought, insured his life, and Lucy and her boy were thus 
 placed above the reach of actual want. 
 
 It was but a slender provision ; but in the relative order of 
 things, it was quite a bountiful one to Lucy, with her humble 
 needs and her innocent, thankful heart. 
 
 The old lares et penates of her youth were still about her — the 
 shabby old furniture of her childhood, the musty library of the 
 deceased coach, and the silver inkstand. They had been given 
 house-room by a neighbouring rector in a great unused coach-house, 
 and they were mustier than ever, and covered with a fine coat of 
 blue mould when Lucy saw them again. Nevertheless, the sight of 
 their dear besoiled old faces brought a blessed rush of tears to her 
 eyes, and their familiar presence filled the poor cottage with sweet, 
 tender memories. 
 
 It was a ridiculous mite of a cottage, standing back from the 
 highroad in a little homely garden, amid green meadows and 
 flowering hawthorn hedges, with the wooded hills rising steeply 
 behind it. It was delightfully white and low-browed, and crowned 
 with thatch, which was golden in the sun with lichens and stone- 
 worts. And from its tiny casements, which were overhung with 
 creeping plants, there was a glorious view of the deep-blue Severn 
 Sea. 
 
 Among such surroundings Herbert Flowers grew from infancy to 
 childhood, and from childhood to youth. The breath of the salt 
 sea, the brave south-westers that come tearing up from the Atlan- 
 tic, had made him hardy of limb, and the watchful love and care — 
 and prayers — of that tender Mentor of his youth had made him 
 brave, and manly, and gentle, and chivalrous. 
 
 The sun had browned his cheeks, and tanned and freckled his fair 
 open forehead ; but another influence, not less potent, had warmed 
 his inner nature and made him sensitive and impressionable, and 
 generous to the faults of others. 
 
 Lucy's boy had not grown up without education. The simple 
 lessons lisped at his mother's knee expanded by-and-by into the 
 less delightful tasks of his native grammar school. 
 
 Herbert Flowers was not at all a remarkable scholar. The 
 Greek language presented exceptional difficulties to him and he 
 couldn't see his way in Latin verses. 
 
 He was persevering and industrious, but by no means a genius. 
 
 Lucy remembered his father, and sighed ; but she never lost 
 faith in him. 
 
ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONARII. 7 
 
 One day, when she was bewailing his deficiencies, she resolved 
 that, in order to help her boy, she would learn Greek herself. And 
 why not ? 
 
 She was a scholar's daughter, and the library of the old coach, 
 which had been growing mustier and mustier every year, was on 
 the shabby bookshelves. 
 
 She had mastered the alphabet in her childhood, and toiled half- 
 way through the Greek Grammar. 
 
 What a task it had been then ! What a labour of love it was 
 now, with Herbert in happy rivalry, plodding — already less wearily 
 — on by her side. 
 
 There was a delightful curate, who used to come in of evenings 
 to coach the widow and her son ; and the patience and long-suffer- 
 ing of that single-minded young man were something wonderful. 
 
 He was very fond of the verb <pi\eli', and was never tired of 
 hearing Lucy repeat it, looking modestly, with ingenuous blushes, 
 into her sweet eyes the while — they were still sweet, and worth 
 looking into. But the ungrateful widow preferred looking into 
 her boy's sun-browned face, and finishing the delightful verb up 
 with a maternal embrace. 
 
 The curate would sigh, and walk sadly home to his humble 
 lodging, repeating the lesson softly to himself under the stars, 
 with the addition of a very pretty rendering in Greek of the noun 
 'Lucy.' 
 
 Other lovers had declined the same noun, in conjunction with 
 the same delightful verb, during Lucy's long, uneventful widow- 
 hood, but the faithful little woman was Lucy Flowers still. She 
 had never forgotten that white stone — it was all aslant now — in 
 Grantchester Churchyard. 
 
 Herbert got on better with his Greek after a few months of this 
 friendly rivalry ; he got on so well, indeed, that he earned a remove 
 to a higher form, and a prize, too, at the next school speech-day. 
 
 Wh:'-i a proud and happy day it was to Lucy when little Herbert, 
 in public school parlance, 'broke his duck's egg ' — otherwise too 1 *, 
 his first prize. It was a very small prize to be proud of at a 1 ! ! 
 Heaps of boys took away whole armfuls of books — big hands. ms 
 volumes, worth winning— and carried off scholarships and exhibi- 
 tions, while their parents sat by placid and unmoved ; and there 
 was that foolish little Lucy with the glad tears brimming in her 
 ayes, blurring all the stolid faces that swam before her, and creating 
 quite a nimbus around the kind face of the noble old <jarl who dis- 
 tributed the prizes, because her boy had won a shabby little meagre 
 volume — the classical prize in the lowest form of the lower school ! 
 Some people — women mostly — are thankful for \ery small things 
 
 But Lucy did a dreadful thing on that occasion. Her manners, 
 unfortunately, had not the repose that mark': the caste of Yere of 
 Vere, or even of the county families of No. ih Devon. 
 
 The glad, foolish, proud mother, with „ne tears brimming in her 
 
8 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 eyes, and her full heart overflowing with joy, waved a white hand- 
 kerchief from her back seat as Herbert, blushing modestly all ihe 
 way, came down the hall, amid the cheering of his schoolfellows. 
 
 ' You shouldn't have done that, mamma,' he said, in a tone of re- 
 monstrance, when he came home, and she was covering his face 
 with kisses ; 'it made the other fellows laugh.' 
 
 She never waved a white handkerchief again, though she sat 
 year after year in that crowded hall, and saw him carry away prize 
 after prize — armf uls of them later on, and by-and-by a scholar- 
 ship. 
 
 He ever remembered with a pang of contrition, when the day 
 came that the kind hand could wave no more pocket-handkerchiefs, 
 that boyish remonstrance. He has distributed prizes himself since 
 then ; and the remembrance of that day and that scene ever rises 
 before him on these occasions ; and he is surprised to see how 
 shining the faces of the boys are, as they swim before him in a 
 quite unaccountable mist, when some foolish mother in the crowd 
 waves a white handkerchief because her boy takes an insignificant 
 little prize. 
 
 But this is a divergence. 
 
 Lucy had other things to do beside waving pocket-handkerchiefs 
 however proud and happy the occasion. 
 
 Her slender little income no longer sufficed for her growing 
 expenses. She had her ambitions, like more wealthy mothers, and 
 she liked to see her boy hold his own with the rest. But the 
 slender thread of that narrow income was not elastic ; and year 
 after year it failed, when drawn out to the most attenuated thread, 
 to encompass her growing expenses. 
 
 A happy inspiration came to the little widow, when this terribly 
 urgent question of ways and means was consuming her with 
 anxiety. 
 
 Was she not a scholar's daughter, and a scholar's wife, and already 
 herself a very fair Greek and Latin scholar ? She would take 
 pupils, and teach other boys, as she had taught her own, the simple 
 rudiments of what they would have to learn more fully hereafter, 
 at a public school. 
 
 She had not far to seek for pupils. There was quite a nursery 
 full of young hopefuls, waiting to be instructed in living languages, 
 as well as dead, up at the great house across the river. 
 
 The great house, otherwise known to all the country round as 
 Bratton Court, was the residence of Sir Hugh Spurway, who, 
 beside being blessed with a lovely wife — the daughter of an earl — 
 was blessed more superlatively with seven lovely children. 
 
 Master Tom Spurway, the eldest, was at Eton ; Miss Muriel 
 Spurway, the fair daughter of the house, was in her teens ; and 
 the five younger scions of the noble house were in the schoolroom 
 or nursery, or both. 
 
 The education of the younger Spurways was superintended by a 
 
ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONARII. 9 
 
 young Breton girl, whose mother had been Lady Millicent's nurse. 
 Her Ladyship, who was nothing if not philanthropic, had adopted 
 the girl, and educated her nicely, with a becoming sense of her 
 dependence ; and in return she was imparting as much of that 
 education as she could remember to the unruly members of the 
 Bratton nursery. 
 
 Her benefactress was not satisfied with the result ; and when 
 Lucy Flowers signified her desire to take pupils, she was engaged 
 at once to superintend the education of the junior members of this 
 noble family. 
 
 The post was no sinecure. The children were high-spirited and 
 self- willed, not to say rebellious and defiant ; and the work of the 
 timid little institutrice was quite cut out. 
 
 But Lucy stuck to her task bravely, and she had her reward. 
 The golden guineas and the dear, crisp, fluttering bank-notes that 
 came in with delightful punctuality at the end of every quarter — 
 there were four in the year then, not three unequal divisions of 
 time, as now — were a sufficient balm for every wound. 
 
 This little income, so hardly earned, was a perfect El Dorado to 
 Lucy and her boy. And the arrangement was not without its 
 advantages to Herbert Flowers. He used to walk up to the great 
 house on half holidays and saints' days — they had a good many at 
 St. Anne's Grammar School ; the calendar hadn't been revised 
 lately — and help his mother by taking the older boys in Greek. 
 He had outrun the dear patient little mother in the race, and 
 mouthed his Homer with the best. 
 
 They were delightful afternoons, and red-letter days indeed to 
 the humble-minded schoolboy. 
 
 What to him, in those happy unconventional days, that he had to 
 go round the back way — and a very long way round it was — and 
 enter the great house by the back stairs ? 
 
 The birds sang quite as delightfully, and the azaleas and rhodo- 
 dendrons bloomed as luxuriantly, and the perfume of the great 
 heavy-headed roses was quite as sweet, as in my lady's rose-garden, 
 which you passed as you came up by the avenue to the great stately 
 front-door. 
 
 Herbert had never been round that way, but he used to push the 
 rhododendrons aside, and get glimpses of the charmed world that 
 lay so far beyond him, and see the quality disporting themselves on 
 the lawn, and the peacock, that had as many eyes as there are days 
 in the year in his tail, strutting proudly in the sun. 
 
 The sight of that ridiculous bird, who always flaunted his great 
 ostentatious tail at him, hurt him like a personal insult. He didn't 
 object to the back-stairs, and he didn't at all mind that long way 
 round beneath the trees, where the birds were singing, that led to 
 the back entrance, but he hated the peacock. 
 
 Julie, the Breton governess, was very glad of the willing assist- 
 
io A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ance of the clever sixth-form boy in that uproarious schoolroom. 
 Herbert inherited, on his mother's side, the old coach's happy tact 
 of ruling other minds, and the youthful disciplinarian would restore 
 order when his worn-out parent and her timid little coadjutor, 
 Julie, were powerless in the midst of open rebellion and anarchy. 
 
 He came up pretty often to the great house, but never too often 
 for Julie. He was quite at home at the schoolroom tea, presided 
 over by the pretty timid little gouvernante, and ate the thick bread 
 and butter, and spread the schoolroom marmalade, with infinite 
 relish. 
 
 He stayed behind pretty often, and let his weary parent walk 
 home — by the back way — alone, while he played with the children 
 in the meadow behind the house, out of the sight of the pleasant 
 lawn where the quality disported themselves. 
 
 He showed the boys how to put the weight, and how to make a 
 fine kick-off in football ; he initiated them into all the dark 
 mysteries of that delightful game where bone and muscle are of no 
 avail against skill and speed. 
 
 He showed them how to gather themselves up for the high jump, 
 and how to spread themselves out for the long jump ; how to draw 
 upon their wind for the short race, and how to husband it for the 
 long. 
 
 In all these diversions, Julie was not very much good, but she 
 stood by with the two girls and formed the audience, and led the 
 applause. She always wore a very becoming hat on this occasion, 
 formerly my lady's, and a gauzy scarf, late my lady's also, wound 
 daintily around her expressive shoulders, and a fresh rosebud in her 
 bosom, and bows on her high-heeled French shoes. 
 
 It was very nice of the little Breton governess to take so much 
 trouble for the benefit of a poor sixth-form boy at a public school, 
 when, on other occasions, when the children played alone, she wore 
 untidy little slippers down at heel, and a handkerchief tied beneath 
 her chin, and a faded old shawl about her shoulders, and never took 
 any interest whatever in their games. 
 
 She knew quite well when to expect him, for she had a little 
 Catholic calendar — my lad3 7 's new year's gift — with all the half- 
 holidays and saints' days carefully marked, so that she was never 
 caught unawares, down at heel and in curl-papers. 
 
 She was a slattern at heart, like most Frenchwomen, that pretty 
 petite Julie with her shifty toilette and ravishing coiffures. Poor 
 little soul ! she had only my lady's and Miss Muriel's lef t-off finery 
 by way of salary, and she was quite alone in the world. 
 
 She was very fond of admiration — she did not stand quite alone 
 in that respect — and she would have liked a little love ; she didn't 
 get either at Bratton Court, so she was fain to fall back upon a 
 schoolboy pair passer le temps. 
 
 In the holidays when Tom Spurway was home from Eton, he 
 would condescend in a superior way to join in the children's games. 
 
ERNESTI FLOWERS, PENSIONARIl. zi 
 
 Unfortunately for his dignity, Herbert Flowers invariably beat him 
 in every trial of strength, or speed, or skill, arid the amiable 
 children would hail their elder brother's failures with truly fraternal 
 shouts of derision. "When he had had quite enough of it, and had 
 been sufficiently bruised and beaten, or broken his shins over the 
 hurdles, or disclocated his wrist at football, or sprained his ankle in 
 jumping, he would retire sulkily to the house, and ' confound the 
 beggar's impudence ' by the way ; but he never invited the ' beggar ' 
 to enter with him and partake of my lady's hospitality. 
 
 When the family happened to be staying at the Court, i.e., 
 her ladyship, Sir Hugh, and Miss Muriel, her ladyship's eldest 
 daughter would sometimes condescend also to join in the children's 
 games. 
 
 She was more popular with her younger brothers than the 
 Etonian, and didn't give herself airs. Perhaps it would have been 
 quite as well if she had, and saved the foolish schoolboy many a 
 heartache. 
 
 Muriel Spurway was the Diana of the West-Country ; she had 
 ridden to hounds ever since she could sit in the saddle. A bright, 
 fearless girl with plenty of pluck, and, as her admirers used to ex- 
 press it, with fitting elegance of speech, 'not a ha'porth of 
 sentiment.' 
 
 Perhaps that was her especial charm, as it divested her of all 
 restraint and self-consciousness, and she flung herself into every 
 out-door sport as if she had been a boy among boys. During the 
 hunting season she lived in the saddle, and when the spring came, 
 rod in hand, she would land the silver shining salmon with any 
 angler on the Torridge, or follow the bead on the river in pursuit 
 of the delusive otter. 
 
 Failing other engagements, Miss Muriel would betake herself to 
 milder forms of recreation — cricket, football, quoits, skittles — or 
 whatever happened to come uppermost, and finding a congenial 
 spirit in Herbert Flowers, she would desert the tennis-court, where 
 her ladyship's guests disported themselves, and play cricket for 
 hours in the field behind the stables with the sixth-form schoolboy 
 who had come up — by the back way — to help the children with 
 their Greek. 
 
 He taught her many things beside bowling in those delightful 
 half-holidays. She was not at all above skittles, or quoits, or 
 rounders, and could put the weight or throw the cricket- ball with 
 Herbert himself. 
 
 It was a dangerously delightful time to the impressionable school- 
 boy, but it was not without its benefit — its quite incalculable 
 benefit. 
 
 Latin verses, which had hitherto been Herbert's bugbear, and 
 had never given him a chance in his form, suddenly became his 
 delight and his incessant occupation. He saw his way now as he 
 had never seen it before ; the disordered syllables fell all at once 
 
{j A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 into their places, and hexameters and pentameters grew beneath his 
 eager pen. 
 
 What happy inspiration was this — this sndden sweet facility, 
 this magic music that found spontaneous rhythmic utterance ? 
 
 Herbert Flowers' Latin verses were all at once the wonder of the 
 sixth form, and of the whole school indeed ; but there was a 
 woman's name that, under one disguise or another, was never 
 absent from these dainty elegiacs — Muriel, Murietta, Muriella. 
 
 The foolish boy secretly nursed his passion, and created saints' 
 days quite foreign to the calendar, on his own account, in order to 
 steal up — by the back way — to the great house, and bowl through 
 the hot June sunshine to Muriel Spurway ; and when she grew 
 tired, and joined the quality on the tennis-lawn, dismissing her 
 humble admirer with an indifferent nod, and a ' No more cricket 
 to-day, thank you, Flowers,' he would steal away among the shrubs, 
 and, parting the rhododendrons, watch her disporting herself among 
 the squirearchy of the county, and he would grind his heel into the 
 the gravel and turn savagely away. 
 
 The peacock, who was sunning himself on the sloping bank 
 adjoining the shrubbery, caught him one day in the act, and 
 screeched at him in his arrogant, ridiculous way. Herbert was sore 
 at heart, and his cup of humiliation was quite full already ; and he 
 picked up the first stone that came to his hand and flung it at the 
 creature, who rolled over and limped crestfallen away, dragging his 
 foolish tail in the dust. Herbert was dreadfully ashamed of 
 himself, but he hated the wretched bird more than ever. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IN STATU PUPILLARI. 
 
 ' When all the world was young, lad !' 
 
 There were more stirring events awaiting the shamefaced school- 
 boy, who had only now begun to realize dimly what it was to be 
 poor and proud, than peeping through rhododendrons, and throwing 
 stones at peacocks. 
 
 The school examinations were coming on, and he was entered, 
 with three others, in the competition for the Sidney Sussex 
 Scholarship that fell vacant this year. Great issues hung upon 
 the result of the examination. If he won the school scholarship 
 he would go to college, and by-and-by become a member of some 
 learned profession. If he failed, that dream would be all over, and 
 he must sit on a high stool in an office, or sweep a shop, or dispense 
 physic and make up pills, which last alternative was as agreeable to 
 Herbert Flowers' mind as taking them. 
 
 When Lucy timidly expostulated with him on that memorable 
 aight when he had lamed the peacock, and meekly suggested that 
 
IN STATU PUPILLARI. 13 
 
 he 8hould go up to the great house no more until the examination 
 was over, he answered readily enough, in the bitterness of his spirit, 
 'All right, mother ; I'll not go up to Bratton Court again until I go 
 up to the front door.' 
 
 And he did not go up again for many days ; and Julie arranged her 
 coiffures, and wore out her French shoes, in vain. 
 
 There were not many days to prepare for the great event. 
 
 ' I haven't a ghost of a chance, Jones,' he said, on the eve of the 
 fateful day, to the fellow who would run him closest ; ' if it weren't 
 for the mater's sake I wouldn't go in ; but you've nothing to fear 
 from me. I'm out of the running already. I wish you luck, Jones, 
 with all my heart !' 
 
 And he meant it. 
 
 He did his best, which is all a schoolboy — or a man — can do, and 
 waited with Spartan resignation for the result. 
 
 He had relieved his mind of an enormous weight of Latin and 
 Greek verbs, and had leisure to contemplate the pestle and mortar 
 business, which he told himself was now inevitable. 
 
 He had so far assured himself of the certainty of his foregone 
 conclusions, that he had begged his mother not to expose herself to 
 certain mortification by being present when the result was an- 
 nounced ; and he sheltered himself at the very back of the great 
 schoolroom, behind all the lower-form boys, on Speech Day, that 
 the little narrow world of Bideford should not mock at his dis- 
 comfiture. 
 
 Her ladyship was there, among the county people in the front 
 seats, and Sir Hugh, who was a trustee of the school, distributed 
 the prizes. 
 
 He saw the Diana of his hexameters in a diaphanous cloud, with 
 a red, red rose in her bosom, between the legs of the lower-form 
 boys. But he heard nothing ; he was too busy trying to get a 
 glimpse at the face above that red rose, and the boys were all 
 stamping with their feet, so that he only got a piecemeal view by 
 snatches — a rose between one pair of legs and a ringlet behind 
 another. 
 
 Why couldn't the fellows sit still ? and what a deuce of a noise 
 they were making ! and what were they shouting his name for ? 
 Sir Hugh was on his legs, and was making a speech, or trying to, 
 and the cheering was deafening. 
 
 Again his name was on every lip ; tush ! it was only a singing in 
 his ears, and he applied himself again to get a kaleidoscope view 
 of the rose and its wearer. 
 
 'Flowers! Flowers!' It was his name — there could be no 
 mistaking it now — and he came forward, white and grave, and with 
 all the faces in the room piled one above the other, and heaped 
 together like faces in a crowded theatre. 
 
 He saw none of them distinctly, only a red rose on a white bosom, 
 seen through a mist ; and presently Sir Hugh was grasping his 
 
14 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 hand in his hearty grip, and congratulating him on his success — his 
 success ? his ? — and expressing a very kind hope that he would do 
 credit to his old school, and head that blank honoris causa, that had 
 ju?t been set up on the bare walls of the big schoolroom, with a 
 great University success. 
 
 He heard it all in a dream ; and saw the familiar faces in the hall 
 swimming before him with a sense that it was all very far off, and 
 quite unreal. 
 
 But as he came down the hall Muriel Spurway held out a little 
 gloved hand, and warmly congratulated him on his success, and 
 Lady Millicent surveyed him through her gold eyeglass as if he 
 were some curious animal. 
 
 ' Dear me,' said her ladyship, with that delightful urbanity that 
 characterized her intercourse with her inferiors, ' so this is Herbert 
 Flowers !' 
 
 She gave him — Lady Millicent was the most condescending of 
 women, and she could afford to be, which is more than every 
 woman in her position can — she gave him exactly two fingers, and 
 Muriel smilingly gave him a rose. 
 
 He never knew how he got back to his seat. He didn't at all 
 believe it was real when the ceremony of the prize-giving was 
 resumed. He saw all the other fellows going up for their 
 smaller prizes, and he felt somehow that he was out of the running. 
 There was a great gulf between them now. He was a schoolboy 
 no longer. 
 
 He had got the prize he most coveted — a red rose. 
 
 He never looked over to the back seats, where the dear friend 
 who rejoiced, as no other friend on earth ever would rejoice, at his 
 success, sat white and tearful, with a trembling paean welling up in 
 her heart too deep for words. 
 
 Only when Jones faltered his honest congratulations in the 
 school grounds, when it was all over, he fairly broke down. 
 
 ' Oh Jones,' he said, ' I'm so sorry ! I don't deserve it half so 
 much as you do. Please God, you shall have it yet, Jones ! And 
 he wrung the astonished fellow's hand, and went off worshipping 
 his rose. 
 
 Herbert Flowers was as good as his word, and Jones took the 
 school scholarship at Sidney Sussex College, he himself having, 
 meanwhile, won a sizarship at Trinity. 
 
 He said nothing about it to the little mother at Bideford until 
 the matter was settled. He went in for the stiffest scholarship 
 examination in Cambridge without help or advice from anyone, 
 and scored his first University success. 
 
 "When he took possession of the bare rooms allotted to him at 
 the top of the staircase, commanding a fine view of the roof of the 
 chapel, and prepared for his first night in college, he took care- 
 fully out from between the folds of silver paper where it reposed 
 by day a very faded, scentless, dilapidated flower, on a nasty prickly 
 
IN STATU PUPILLARI. 15 
 
 *ta!k, that had once been a red rose. He kissed the poor thing — 
 he didn"t mind the thorns — and put it reverently under his pilliow. 
 He had worn it over his heart all the day when he had been work- 
 ing away at the examination, and it had brought him luck. 
 
 Surely it had brought him luck ! 
 
 There were carven roses of a larger growth and more enduring 
 substance, scattered with a lavish hand over the venerable walls 
 and gateways of every college in the 'Yarsity : great Tudor roses ; 
 crowned roses of Lancaster and York ; rutilantes roses, with flaming 
 suns behind them, lighting up the way to success, distinction, fame 
 — a royal rose-crowned way. 
 
 There were roses enough here, on walls, and gateways, and 
 screens, and ceilings, and carven stalls, and painted panes, to have 
 brought good fortune to any number of susceptible under- 
 graduates. 
 
 But what to those who failed ? Well, there was a portcullis 
 always ready, evenly balancing the rose — success and failure ever 
 going hand in hand. 
 
 Was it the rose under his pillow that filled his waking thoughts 
 and his foolish dreams, that first night in college, with visions of 
 Muriel Spurway encouraging him at the back-door, disdaining him 
 at the front, and filling him with unutterable hopes and ambi- 
 tions ? 
 
 The little mother hadn't given him a rose at parting. She could 
 hardly have got one into the little silk-netted purse she gave him 
 with her blessing. The station-master at Bideford wouldn't have 
 exchanged it for a railway ticket if she had. But she gave him 
 the best of her small store, packed in two shabby boxes, and 
 addressed carefully in her own neat hand. 
 
 His conscience pricked lrm the following morning, when he un- 
 packed them, and remembered the kind friend who was praying for 
 him, he knew, at that very moment ; and whose gentle forethought 
 had filled those bare rooms with so many touching mementoes of 
 home. There was nothing lacking that Lucy's slender resources 
 could supply. The musty old classics, that he had already begun 
 to value as old friends, looked down with familiar faces at him, 
 from the scantily-filled book-shelves on the wall, and on his table 
 was the old coach's silver inkstand. 
 
 He vowed in his heart that he would be worthy of this love ; 
 that his life here— his honourable and manly life, God helping him 
 — should not whiten a single hair of that dear head. 
 
 What a proud and happy day it was, that memorable, never-to- 
 be-forgotten day when he assumed the toga virilis, and wore the 
 empurpled gown of Trinity — a second-hand one ! Does any man, 
 to the end of the longest life, ever forget that proud and happy 
 first day ? There have been later successes — other first days, 
 memorable in their way. The first day in the pulpit, the first on 
 the Bench, the first speech in the House, the first command in the 
 
id A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 field — but the couleur de rose had paled by that time. There is no 
 colouring so bright as the long-faded colours of those early days ! 
 Who does not look back upon them, realizing only when they are 
 long past how happy they were ! 
 
 One is very much wiser now, and richer, and, maybe, has 
 reached the highest round of the ladder ; but who does not 
 remember the daisies that grew round the foot when one was 
 climbing that lowest rung ? Ah, but the old days were the best ! 
 
 Herbert attended chapel twice that first day, and took the lowest 
 seat among the ingenuous freshmen, and being a saint's day, he 
 wore his bran-new surplice with becoming modesty. At Hall, as 
 the youngest of the newly-elected scholars, he read the long Latin 
 grace. His voice may have trembled as he stood up at the end of 
 the scholar's table, with all the other men looking on, and the dons 
 at the high tables looking down, lying in wait, as it were, for false 
 quantities ; but he had got from the Benedic Domine to the last 
 echoing syllable of the long Trinity grace without a quantity mis- 
 placed. It never trembled after that, and the men never listened 
 again, with supercilious tolerance, for false quantities at the lips of 
 Herbert Flowers. 
 
 The few gold coins in that slender silk purse went a very little 
 way in the quite unavoidable expenses of commencing residence. 
 There was the furniture of the rooms to be taken off, at a valuation, 
 to begin with— such furniture as it was ! The former owner, being 
 somewhat of a humorist, had left an inventory behind him for 
 the assistance of the college valuer. It ran somewhat thus : 
 
 'Couch, minus three legs and the back; uneasy arm-chair, 
 minus the arms (caution — beware of the back legs) ; portraits of 
 Bendigo Bill, Tom Sayers, the Pimlico Pet (heads missing) ; 
 looking-glass, with a hole in the middle where "Alice went 
 through ; book-shelves, as good as new ; handle of a shovel (Gothic 
 design), and a tong ; an aesthetic teapot without a spout (design 
 registered), and a coffee-pot to match, minus the handle ; sundry 
 ware, all warranted to leak. Thrown in — the bedmaher's ghost.' 
 
 There were other more long-suffering articles of furniture which 
 had escaped the playful treatment of the former owner and his 
 friends, which, with a little repair, sufficed for Herbert's humble 
 requirements, but he objected altogether to the last item in the list. 
 
 ' Very sorry, sir,' said the college gyp, 'but it belongs to the rooms. 
 Every gentleman has to have it, whether he will or no. It is never 
 troublesome except when the men are going down, and, then gentle- 
 men do say, it does make a bit of a stir ; but its perfectly harmless, 
 sir. Jest throw a coal-scuttle, or a tong, or anything that comes 
 to hand, at the door, and her"!! be quiet in a minute.' 
 
 It was a rather uncanny story connected with the ghost, though 
 Herbert loftily declared he didn't believe a word of it. 
 
 And he didn't — in the daytime. But when night came, and his 
 
IN STATU PUPILLARI. 17 
 
 oak was sported, and the college was wrapped in slumber, and the 
 wind shrieked across the deserted quads, and whistled in an un- 
 pleasant way it had down his chimney, and tapped at his windows 
 that looked out upon the leads, he was not quite so sceptical. He 
 could not help thinking at these times of the old bedmaker who 
 had hidden herself away in her den while the man who kept in the 
 rooms had innocently locked his oak and put the key in his pocket 
 and gone down, and when he came up, at the end of the long 
 vacation, and unlocked the door, discovered the skeleton of his 
 bedmaker stretched across the threshold. 
 
 It was uncanny, to say the least of it. Herbert used to think he 
 heard the poor old creature tapping at the window-panes in the 
 night, or beating upon the door of that inner den, which he was 
 always very careful to shut before he went to bed ; but it was only 
 the college cats disporting themselves upon the roof. 
 
 He awoke with a start one night, and beheld, with a shiver 
 running down his back, two fiery eyes staring in at his window ; 
 but it was only one of the playful creatures returning from a 
 midnight prowl. He got used to it after a few nights, and the 
 usual musical accompaniments of their diversions, that were a 
 distraction to other men, were a reassuring balm to his excited 
 imagination. 
 
 His rooms were not bad ones, when he had learnt to accommodate 
 himself to the peculiar exigences of their structure. They were 
 large and airy, very airy, especially on windy nights ; but at one 
 end the roof was pitched so low that even the bedmaker' s ghost 
 couldn't have stood upright, and there were nasty beams across 
 that were always lying in wait, as it were, for any sudden or 
 thoughtless mode of advance. Herbert got used to it, but it tried 
 his friends sorely, who generally carried away on their foreheads 
 visible tokens of their visit. 
 
 There were three doors in the keeping-room, and a draught, or 
 rather three draughts, each door had its own particular draught, to 
 say nothing of the windows, of which there was quite a broadside, 
 ill-fitting, and given to rattle upon the smallest provocation. 
 
 Still the situation had its advantages. It ensured quiet to some 
 extent, and was far removed from the giddy distractions that beset 
 more highly-favoured undergraduates in the rooms below. 
 
 Herbert had come up to work. He had no need to remind 
 himself of that immutable decision, like other men of Trinity who 
 made solemn resolutions every night and broke them with unvary- 
 ing regularity every morning. Was it not graven with a pen of 
 iron, nay, rather with red-hot finger of love, upon the tables of his 
 heart, beneath the scentless petals of that red rose ? 
 
 He had already passed the Little-Go with distinction before he 
 began residence, and was free to work without let or hindrance for 
 his degree. He was an honours-man from the beginning, and th« 
 fire of honest emulation was already smouldering in his breast. 
 
 2 
 
1 8 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 A goodly number of freshmen came up that term to Trinity, and 
 among them came an old acquaintance of Herbert's, Tom Spur- 
 way, from Eton. 
 
 He sat next to him in chapel a few days after his arrival, and he 
 had the gratification of hearing that superior undergraduate, who 
 sat at the table with the fellow-commoners, remark quite audibly 
 as they crossed the quad : 
 
 ' Confound the beggar's impudence !' 
 
 He had occasion to confound the beggar's impudence pretty 
 frequently during the term, as they met very often at lectures, 
 where the poor sizar's homely-cut garments and coarse shoes ' were 
 a source of much delicate pleasantry on the part of the faultlessly 
 attired Etonian. Perhaps this was a justifiable set-off to the 
 invidious comparisons — which were in questionable taste, to say 
 the least of it — that his tutor was wont to draw between the work 
 of the two students. 
 
 But if the Etonian was slow to acknowledge the merits of the 
 modest scholar from a country grammar school, there were plenty 
 of men in Trinity who were glad to make his acquaintance, in spite 
 of his high-lows and the homely cut of his clothes. 
 
 All the men on his staircase called upon him during the first week, 
 and showered their hospitality upon him. Cambridge is nothing if 
 not hospitable. Not that this hospitality did Herbert very much 
 good. At the end of his first week's residence he had already found 
 out that it interfered sadly with his work. 
 
 Breakfasts that were continued till lunch-time didn't accommodate 
 themselves very well to lectures, and post-prandial entertainments 
 that were lengthened into the small hours of the night were not, 
 certainly, conducive to that estimable habit, early rising. 
 
 It was the question of burning the candle at both ends, and 
 the men of his staircase burnt it, with one consent, at the wrong 
 end. 
 
 There was only one other man on the staircase — and he was 
 training, and did half an hour's running before breakfast at Fenner's 
 (the grounds of the Cambridge University Athletic Club) — that 
 was up in time for early chapel. 
 
 Herbert found he could very well, by economizing the matutinal 
 candle, manage half an hour's running at Fenner's, as well as 
 chapel, before breakfast. This morning exercise brought him and 
 the man in training a good deal together. 
 
 Geraint kept beneath him, and had the best rooms on the staircase. 
 It was reported that he was rich, and consequently he hadn't come 
 up to work, only to enjoy himself ; and as long as he followed this 
 commendable pursuit not too obtrusively, the college authorities 
 did not interfere with him. 
 
 He was a splendid fellow, with a magnificent physique, perfectly 
 developed by judicious training ; tall, and broad, and sound as a 
 bell, with a fair, frank face, and crisp, short chestnut curls, and 
 
IN STATU PUPILLARI. 19 
 
 honest blue eyes, that looked straight out at you — as bold as a 
 lion's and as tender as a girl's. 
 
 It was no wonder that Herbert was attracted to him. His easy 
 good-nature and prodigal hospitality had won him the friendship of 
 half the men in Trinity, to say nothing of the men in every other 
 college in the 'Varsity. He was the willing prey of every sponger, 
 the dupe of every blackleg and tiger in the University ; he was 
 worshipped by his gyp, and adored by his bedmaker ; a mine of 
 wealth to the Cambridge tradesmen, a source of regular incorre 
 to the proctors, and a thorn — a generous, pleasant, gcod-natured 
 thorn — in the side of the conscientious Dean of Trinity. 
 
 There was always a difference between Geraint and the Dean — a 
 difference that took the form of brief epistolary correspondence — 
 a correspondence that would have blighted in the bud any future 
 hope of college testimonials ; but Geraint was not likely to require 
 any testimonials of character at the hand of the long-suffering, dis- 
 creetly hoodwinked authorities of Trinity. 
 
 But there had never been any open rupture between him and the 
 Dean. When they ran against one another in the quad, and Geraint 
 met the unspoken rebuke in his kind eyes with his frank, delightful 
 smile, the Dean's grave face would relax, and he would return his 
 greeting as affectionately as if he had never missed a chapel in his 
 life. 
 
 Herbert always parted with Geraint at the chapel door, and 
 would go in alone, with that scanty contingent that came flying 
 across the quads in the gray autumn mornings, just as the bell 
 stopped — eerie forms seen through the mist, wildly struggling into 
 gowns, and arriving panting and breathless at the scene of their 
 morning devotions. 
 
 He neve;' forgot those first early chapels. The strangeness of 
 the scene, the strange faces around him, the gloom and grandeur of 
 the place, heightened by an overpowering rush of old associations, 
 held him spell-bound, till the organ spoke, and the fresh young 
 voices rose sweet and clear, and broke the silence of the sacred place. 
 Those first mornings — there were never any others like them. 
 With hushed, reverent footsteps he passed through the ante- 
 chapel, with the effigies of the noble dead around him. He 
 remembered in those early days — what very few men remembered 
 as they hurried past — that beneath his feet, in the darkness and in 
 the dust, were the bones of those old scholars of Trinity who, by 
 their labours, their quiet unobtrusive labours, within these walls, 
 had both enriched their country's literature and benefited the world 
 by their discoveries in the fruitful fields of science. 
 
 The raw scholar from a country grammar school passed rever- 
 ently through the dimly-lighted ante-chapel, with the great names 
 of a great storied past around him. 
 
 Long familiarity had not yet blunted the first vivid impression. 
 Surely here were the true Olympians ! 
 
 2—2 
 
2o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Had not Bacon and Newton worshipped here ? 
 
 It quite shocked him, in that exalte state, to see the indecorous 
 way in which the undergraduates of Trinity performed their part 
 of the service. 
 
 There was so much audible whispering going on in the higher 
 seats, that Herbert might be forgiven for mistaking the busy black 
 figures with the college lists for the taking notes of it for the 
 benefit of the Dean ; but they were only the college servants, 
 pricking in the names of the men who were present at early 
 chapel. 
 
 The Master of Trinity was always there, in his carved stall 
 under the organ loft, an awful figure, in a magnificent rustling silk 
 gown, with a great Prayer-book on a big velvet cushion in front of 
 him. He never looked over the edge of the big book, he never 
 looked down on the undergraduates below ; he sat serene and 
 solitary, in awful state — an example of rigid devotion. 
 
 Mrs. Howell, the Master's wife, never appeared at early chapel ; 
 but his niece, Lilian Howell, the Trinity Lily, as she was called, 
 was seldom absent. 
 
 Herbert, in glancing up with a freshman's awe at the august 
 presence in the great carved stall, beheld, not the Master, but the 
 sweet, pale face and the clear critical gray eyes of the Trinity 
 Lily. 
 
 He blushed like a schoolboy — he had left school quite three 
 months — and never took his eyes off his book again until the end 
 of the service. 
 
 He modestly asked his new friend Geraint about her as he sat at 
 breakfast with him half an hour later. 
 
 ' You needn't blush so, my dear fellow !' said Geraint kindly. 
 1 She's quite beyond you — she is beyond all of us ; we have all, in 
 our turn, been in love with her. She is well named — a cold, white, 
 passionless Lily ; chills a fellow to the soul to talk to her. She's 
 like that what-d'ye-call-her that a fellow carved out of marble ? 
 I suppose Pygmalion '11 come by some day and wake her up.' 
 
 Herbert sighed and flushed scarlet. It was the early days of his 
 blushes ; they soon ceased to come so readily. 
 
 ' She's not my sort,' said the good-natured giant with a laugh ; ' I 
 prefer a real flesh and blood woman. I'll show you one to-night, 
 Flowers, that'll beat her out and out, if you'll come to % " coffee " 
 with me after Hall.' 
 
THE BELLES OF CAMBRIDGE. 21 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE BELLES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 ' I think we are not wholly brain.' 
 
 Geraint was as good as his word. He called for Herbert af te. 
 Hall faultlessly attired in evening-dress beneath his purple under- 
 graduate gown, with a hothouse flower in his button hole. 
 
 Herbert had no evening clothes, and his boots were dreadfully 
 thick. Geraint looked him over critically. 
 
 ' I say, old fellow,' he stammered, blushing like a girl, ' if you 
 wouldn't mind, you know, my things '11 just fit you. There are 
 heaps of them down there : take your choice.' 
 
 Herbert accepted the loan, and took his choice; but the evening- 
 coat, the smallest that he could find in Geraint's voluminous ward- 
 robe, hung in graceful plaits over his youthful figure. He was 
 very glad to cover it over with his gown, and hide his shamefaced 
 blushes in the darkness of the quad. He had never worn an 
 evening-coat before. At the gate of Trinity, Geraint hailed a 
 hansom, and the friends drove rapidly to the classic shades of 
 Chesterton. 
 
 The cab stopped at a handsome house, standing modestly back 
 from the road, a miniature shrubbery shutting it out from too 
 inquisitive eyes, with a convenient little carriage-drive winding 
 through it, which ensured the utmost privacy to visitors in coming 
 and going. Not even a lamp cast a welcoming ray across the thres- 
 hold ; the Jehus of Cambridge knew the way very well, and there 
 had never been an accident to speak of, though carriages 'with 
 hilarious occupants were coming and going through that gloomy 
 shrubbery at all sorts of hours. 
 
 Geraint dismissed the cab before he knocked at the door. 
 
 • You needn't play unless you like, Flowers,' he said in a low 
 foice, as he put out his cigar in the porch. ' You can look on.' 
 
 He touched a bell as he spoke, an electric bell, that rung some- 
 where with a mysterious, confidential sound. A boy with in- 
 numerable buttons opened the door into a small vestibule dimly 
 lighted, and having admitted them and closed the door, threw open 
 B baize-covered door into an inner hall. 
 
 Coming in from the darkness, the sudden glare of light for a 
 moment blinded Herbert, as he stood on the threshold awkwardly 
 divesting himself of his cap and gown. 
 
 There were other caps and gowns hanging in the brilliantly- 
 lighted hall beside his, some with ribbons to them, he remarked, as 
 with feeble wonder he looked round at the very novel scene before 
 him. It was a large entrance-hill full of palms, and pictures, and 
 btatuary, and rose-coloured lamps, and soft carpets, with heavy 
 
72 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 silken hangings before the doors ; a delightful scent of flowers, a 
 low subdued sound of music and laughter, an intoxicating atmo- 
 sphere of warmth, and ease and Men etre. 
 
 A t least, this is how Herbert summed it up in his own mind, as 
 he tossed restlessly in his bed some hours later. 
 
 A demure looking maid-servant led them into an inner room 
 where coffee was dispensed at one end of a long table, and stronger 
 waters at the other. 
 
 Several men were gathered at this end of the table, and Geraint 
 joined them. Herbert heard the popping of champagne corks v.hile 
 he modestly drank a scalding cup of coffee. He was far too 
 nervous and bashful to help himself freely to milk. 
 
 As he punished himself dreadfully in trying to swallow it, a 
 white arm, the roundest, whitest, most beautifully-shaped arm he 
 had ever beheld, pushed the heavy curtain that hung between the 
 rooms aside. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Geraint we thought you were never coming !' 
 The voice belonged to the arm — a rich full voice, with latent 
 depth and power in it, like the arm. The beauteous sinuous thing 
 was too round, and firm, and velvety, not to suggest strength — 
 latent strength, somewhere. 
 
 ' I have not only come, but I have brought a friend,' said Geraint, 
 laying down his glass and introducing Herbert. ' Flowers of Trinity 
 — Miss Bellenden.' 
 
 Herbert modestly bowed to the owner of the arm, and the owner 
 of the arm vouchsafed him a momentary glance, and dismissed him 
 from any further notice or attention during the remainder of the 
 evening. 
 
 Only a momentary glance, but it embraced every detail of hia 
 face and figure, even the plaits and puckers of his ill-fitting evening- 
 coat. 
 
 The face was true to the promise of the arm when Herbert 
 dared to raise his eyes to it. He was so subdued by the sight of 
 so much beauty that he dropped them again with a blush directly. 
 He need not have distressed himself ; the gleaming teeth and 
 the flashing eyes were smiling upon someone else now. 
 
 Miss Bellenden's rooms were very full that night, and Herbert 
 remarked that the guests were nearly all men — University men — 
 and that the ladies — there were only quite a small spri nkli ng of 
 ladies present — were young and lovely, and had no chaperons. 
 
 The light was soft and rose-hued, and the room was warm and 
 pleasant, and there was a delicious languorous odour in the air that 
 steeped the senses like a narcotic. 
 
 But it was all quite en regie. The lovely hostess was a lady 
 received into the best society in Cambridge, and her guests were 
 ladies from a neighbouring seminary of sound learning, affiliated to 
 the University. 
 
 But it was Bohemia, nevertheless. 
 
THE BELLES OF CAMBRIDGE. 23 
 
 The sweet girl-undergraduates, in their dainty toilettes, and with 
 their charming affectation of superior learning, were quite aware it 
 was Bohemia. 
 
 They had left their chaperon at home (correcting, no doubt, 
 their untidy exercises) ; but they had come in a body, and unity is 
 strength. 
 
 It was certainly not one of these chaste divinities — they all wore 
 glasses : dainty, piquant little glasses, which were very becoming, 
 and imparted a quite superior and scholarly air — that was seated 
 at the piano and the men were crowding round. Herbert could 
 not see the singer ; he could only see her shoulder — glimpses of it, 
 rather ; not enough of it at any time to satisfy himself if it were 
 velvet, or flesh and blood. 
 
 It was the most velvety shoulder he had ever beheld, and there 
 was a good deal of it, as he saw by degrees. 
 
 But he could hear the song. It might have been a funeral dirge, 
 it was so utterly gruesome and despairing ; and the full rich voice 
 was full of tears, and lamentation, and woe. 
 
 There was quite a cheerful round of applause when the song was 
 finished, and a girl, a bright brunette sitting beside Herbert, 
 whispered scornfully behind her fan : 
 
 ' That Hebe Bellenden is at her tricks again !' 
 
 '"Who is it to night ?' said her companion. 
 
 •Oh, a Trinity man — that blonde fellow, bending over her. It 
 was a John's man before he came in.' 
 
 'It doesn't matter to Hebe whi<3h/ said the other with a laugh ; 
 1 she encourages them all.' 
 
 ' She's the horridest little flirt I ever saw,' said the brunette im- 
 patiently. ' I have no patience with her ; it's quite disgusting.' 
 
 The men were all crowding round Hebe Bellenden as she rose 
 from the piano, and Geraint was offering her his arm ; one man 
 was carrying her gloves, another had got her fan, and a third her 
 bouquet, as she passed up the room, followed by her little court. 
 
 'No ; I don't call her a flirt,' said the other girl reflectively, 
 watching the precession with critical eyes. ' See, she gives all the 
 men the same encouragement ; it is part of her role. I don't think 
 she can help it. I should rather call it Hebe's fault !' 
 
 ' Hebe's fault !' 
 
 She was not wholly divine, then, as our impressionable under- 
 graduate — round-eyed and open-mouthed — had taken her to be, as 
 she swept past him up the room. 
 
 She was human enough to be ' made up of charms and simple 
 
 wiles, praise, blame, love, ' No ; he dared not follow the poet 
 
 any further in that delightfully suggestive simile. 
 
 It was quite a relief to hear that she had a fault — a quite pardon- 
 able, and wholly delightful fault — that brought her down to a 
 human level. 
 
 The youngest Miss Bellenden was the acknowledged Belle of 
 
24 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Cambridge, and just now the reigning beauty and toast of the Uni« 
 versity, so the ingenuous freshman may be forgiven for his innocent 
 wonder and admiration. 
 
 The sisters Bellenden had long been known as the Belles of 
 Cambridge, but the elder sister's beauty was on the wane — it had 
 lasted very, well, and still lighted up well at night, if the lamps 
 were carefully shaded ; and she had still her shoulders and her arms 
 left, and her gleaming teeth, and brilliant eyes, and classic coils of 
 blue- black hair. 
 
 The younger Miss Bellenden was strangely unlike her sister, 
 except that both had the same velvety complexion and dazzling 
 white skin. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden wore pearls at her throat ; but the pure velvety 
 whiteness of her lovely shoulders made them look dull and sickly in 
 comparison. They were wonderful shoulders ! Hebe talked very 
 little, only in monosyllables, or with her eyes, which were soft and 
 dark and velvety, like her skin, and discreetly veiled by long, 
 sweeping lashes ; but her shoulders spoke volumes ! 
 
 Unkind criticism attributed the peculiar metallic sheen of her pale 
 dead-gold hair to art, and the delicate stationary flush of the wild- 
 rose on her perfect cheek, and the vermilion of her small, straight 
 mouth, to the same obliging handmaid ; but these were her detrac- 
 tors, the shadows cast by her surpassing loveliness. 
 
 It was of no use asking any of the ingdnu girl-undergraduates t<j. 
 sing after Hebe, so Miss Bellenden pounced upon a weak-faced 
 blinking little man, that Herbert remembered to have seen at 
 Trinity, and led him captive to the piano. 
 
 He happened to be the best comic singer in the 'Varsity, and, to 
 the huge delight of an assthetic audience, he accompanied himself 
 with one finger on the piano while he regaled his listeners with the 
 latest thing in music-hall breakdowns. 
 
 The girl-undergraduates left early, and as there were no intro- 
 ductions at Miss Bellenden's • coffees,' they left as they came, un- 
 known, which saved a good deal of possible embarrassment in the 
 future. 
 
 After the ladies left a, change came o'er the scene. The men 
 went into the outer room for a smoke and champagne, and Herbert 
 feebly inquired for some coffee. It was quite cold now, and the 
 woman servants were gone, and he had a certain awful con- 
 sciousness that it was past ten o'clock and that he ought to be in 
 college. 
 
 He looked helplessly over at his Mentor, but Geraint had eyes 
 for no other person in the room but the lovely Hebe, and they 
 were just now cutting for partners. 
 
 Herbert didn't see the cards brought in ; but green tables were 
 spread, and the men were gathered round. There was one lady at 
 each table, and the foolish freshman, who lounged about the room 
 and looked on, grew so excited in the game that he felt in the 
 
THE BELLES OF CAMBRIDGE. 25 
 
 empty pockets of his borrowed clothes for some loose money to 
 stake upon it. 
 
 Miss Bellenden, he remarked, with a certain awe-struck admira- 
 tion, played like an old campaigner. She never missed a point ; 
 she never allowed her attention to wander. Her brilliant eyes had 
 a fierce, hungry heat in them thai he had never seen in a woman's 
 eyes before. Her strong, white, merciless hands gathered in a rich 
 golden harvest from the foolish, wine-heated undergraduates, who 
 grew pale and flushed by turns as their term's allowance melted 
 away before her. 
 
 He turned away from the contemplation of the elder Miss 
 Bellenden's opulent charms, and the greed in her cruel face, to the 
 adjoining table, where Hebe Bellenden sat among her admirers. 
 
 She was winning, too ; there was quite a little heap of gold and 
 some fluttering bank-notes on the table by her side ; but her face 
 was neither flushed nor eager. 
 
 She won so easily, with an indifferent, scornful ease, and when 
 the game was over she threw the cards down on the table, and 
 gathered in her gains with a little disdainful smile curling her thin 
 scarlet lips, as if she despised them for being so easily won. 
 
 A man who had been playing rose at the end of the game and 
 offered his seat to Herbert. He declined it with a feeble attempt 
 at a smile. 
 
 ' No, thanks ; I have no money.' 
 
 1 Oh, that doesn't matter ; let me be your banker !' 
 
 The man pulled out a handful of gold as he spoke, and offered it 
 to Herbert. He took a sovereign with a shame-faced, guilty 
 air. 
 
 'No, thanks ; I won't have any more,' he had just sense enough 
 to say as the man pressed the gold upon him. ' You must tell me 
 to whom I am indebted ?' 
 
 ' Oh, G-rinley, of King's.' 
 
 Herbert took the vacant seat, and then a strange thing happened : 
 between him and the lovely, scornful face rose, somewhere out of 
 his inner consciousness, a pale, pleading face, and the kind eyes 
 looked at him with a sad pity. 
 
 'We are waiting for you, Mr. ' 
 
 4 Flowers,' said Geraint, filling up the hiatus. 
 
 ' Oh, a friend of yours ?' 
 
 ' Yes ; you must be merciful to him for my sake.' 
 
 Hebe laughed a low, soft, delightful little laugh, that showed 
 all her pretty white teeth. 
 
 'For your sake !' 
 
 Herbert's vision was gone, and the red lips and the velvety eyes 
 were smiling upon him and thrilling him with a strange unaccount- 
 able fascination. 
 
 He played recklessly, and lost, and rose up hurriedly from the 
 table. He had no more money ; it was no use sitting there. 
 
26 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Geraint rose too, and looked at his watch. 
 
 'I'm afraid you ought to have been in college an hour ago, 
 Flowers.' 
 
 Herbert grew white and cold with a sudden fear ; he wasn't sure, 
 in those early days, what awful thing was going to happen to him. 
 
 ' And you ?' he said rather shakily, for the incidents of the night 
 had upset him. 
 
 ' Oh, it doesn't matter for me !' said the other with a laugh, in 
 which all the men at the table joined. 
 
 ' What, going so early !' exclaimed the elder Miss Bellenden, 
 looking reproachfully at Geraint. 
 
 He nodded significantly towards Herbert, who caught the word 
 ' Freshman !' and a baleful light in the lady's fine eyes at the same 
 moment. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden came forward to wish him good-night. 
 
 ' I am so sorry to have won your money,' she said sweetly ; ' you 
 must come again another night, and win it back.' 
 
 Geraint stayed behind saying his adieux, while Herbert put on 
 his cap and gown in the hall. Perhaps she was telling him to come 
 again and win his money back. 
 
 The men stepped out briskly into the moonlight, for there were 
 no hansoms at that late, or rather early, hour. 
 
 No hansoms, and no proctors, and the streets silent and deserted. 
 They walked in silence till they came to the foot of Magdalene 
 Bridge. Geraint stopped, and dropped the end of his cigar into 
 the river. 
 
 The moonlight touched the old college walls with a transient 
 glory, softening its harsh outlines, and mellowing and subduing the 
 squalid details of the buildings on the opposite bank. A star shot 
 across the sky and seemed to drop in the dark water below. 
 
 Both the men looked down ; they could hear the gurgling of the 
 water beneath the bridge, and the sighing of the night wind in the 
 old college trees. 
 
 ' I wouldn't go there again if I were you, Flowers,' said Geraint, 
 breaking the silence. ' It isn't exactly the place for you. I 
 wanted to show you a real flesh and blood woman, and — and — 
 you've seen her.' 
 
 ' She's the loveliest creature I ever beheld in my life !' inter- 
 rupted Herbert with impetuous ardour. 
 
 ' Te-es, she's all that ; but she's, well — you must know it sooner 
 or later — she's a tiger 1' 
 
 Herbert didn't go to early chapel the next morning. He woke 
 with a racking headache, and feeling seedy and disorganized 
 generally. He had no appetite for his breakfast, and still less for 
 his lunch, for beside his plate, when he came in from lecture, he 
 saw a letter from the Dean requesting the favour of a call. 
 
 It was not altogether the effect of the previous night's dissipation 
 that made his cheek pale, and his legs feel ridiculously shaky, as he 
 
THE BELLES OF CAMBRIDGE. 27 
 
 mounted the Dean's staircase. He was accustomed to take his 
 stairs, as he had a good many to mount to his attic, two at a time, 
 but one of the Dean's was quite as much as he could manage now. 
 
 The Dean was alone, and standing with his back to him at a 
 reading-desk at the end of a long room. He came forward with a 
 — no, not a frown — a pained smile on his kind face, and gave the 
 pale, trembling scholar his hand and pointed him to a chair by the 
 fire. He was scarcely past middle-age, but his face was marked 
 with strong manly furrows, and his hair was already iron-gray. 
 
 1 1 dare say you know why I have sent for you, Mr. Flow ers ?' he 
 began in that soft, slow voice that disarmed the reckless hardihood 
 of the black-sheep of Trinity ; ' and no doubt you will be able to 
 explain. I am informed that you were not in college until long 
 past midnight.' 
 
 And Herbert explained. He could not look into those kind eyes 
 and tell a lie. Of course he did not necessarily say anything about 
 tigers. The Dean accepted his explanation, and dismissed him 
 with a warning. 
 
 He still felt dreadfully guilty at chapel, as he sat, self-con- 
 demned, on his freshman's seat in that conspicuous front row, and 
 felt that the Master's severe eyes were upon him. and the eyes of 
 all the fellows in the stalls, and the singing boys in the choir, and, 
 above all, the Trinity Lily in the corner, looking so white, and 
 pure, and spotless among all those dusky academic gowns. 
 
 He need not have troubled himself, and blushed so furiously, 
 when she looked gravely over at the freshman's seat ; she was not 
 looking at him. 
 
 When he reached his room after chapel he found a little narrow 
 slip of printed paper on his table, which informed him that he was 
 ' gated ' for nine o'clock for the remainder of the term. 
 
 He began about this time to forget to put that fondly-treasured 
 botanical specimen that Muriel Spurway had given him beneath 
 his pillow ; there was very little of it left, indeed, to put anywhere 
 now. He had so often forgotten to remove it lately, and his bed- 
 maker had heartlessly thrown it aside ; and one day he picked it 
 out of the dustpan. Still there were a few thorns left, and a 
 prickly stalk. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ' GATED.' 
 
 * Freshman, running fast to seed ! 
 Scholar, redolent of weed 1' 
 
 Herbeet did not see any more of the Belles of Cambridge during 
 the remainder of the term. And as for his lost sovereign, he was 
 foolish enough, not only not to regret it, but to weakly regard it a§ 
 
28 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 well lost, as it had won for him that delightful invitation that was 
 for ever ringing in his ears : ' Come again, Mr. Flowers, and win it 
 back!' 
 
 That stern mandate of the Dean's which had condemned him to 
 incarceration within the walls of his college — not exactly solitary 
 confinement, as there were probably three hundred of his fellow 
 human beings within easy reach — put it quite out of the question, 
 his paying another visit to La Maison Bellenden this term. 
 
 He could call ; no, he wasn't quite sure that he could. He had 
 a vague suspicion that the 5 p.m. society and the 12 a.m. were 
 widely different. He had met the sisters once in the streets of 
 Cambridge, and they had passed him unrecognising ; and he had 
 sat through a whole service at King's exactly opposite Hebe 
 Bellenden, who was dressed so quietly and behaved so devoutly 
 that she might have been an angel taking an airing. No ; on the 
 whole, he decided it would be better not to call. 
 
 By dint of scraping up all his pocket-money for the term, he 
 managed to repay Grinley, of King's, the temporary loan. Grinley 
 hadn't rooms in his college ; his lodgings were in King's Parade, 
 opposite — and very handsome rooms they were. Whether they 
 were Queen Anne, or Early Plantagenet, or simply aesthetic, 
 Herbert could not tell, but they impressed him as the best rooms 
 he had seen in Cambridge. 
 
 Geraint's, though lavishly furnished with an utter disregard to 
 cost, were quite commonplace in comparison. There was no 
 ostentation here, no overcrowding. There were rare engravings 
 on the walls, and priceless old china in cabinets and on brackets 
 and choice editions of scarce books on the long, low bookshelves 
 and, in one recess, curious arms of foreign workmanship and 
 design. There were no cups stuck about in prominent positions, as 
 in most men's rooms ; no photographs on the walls of college clubs, 
 of incidents of the field and the river ; no athletes, or jockeys, or 
 opera-dancers in scant costumes; not a woman's portrait in the room. 
 
 There was one other occupant of the room when Herbert entered, 
 a huge mastiff stretched out at his full length on a rug before the fire. 
 It rose slowly when he came in the room, and stretched itself 
 leisurely, and shook its yellow coat, and came across the room with 
 great strides to meet him. Herbert stopped, and the dog stopped, 
 for there was a look in the creature's eyes he did not like, and 
 showing his fine teeth, he uttered a low threatening growl like 
 muttered thunder. 
 
 ' Hush, Dear Boy !' said his master with a laugh, ' it's all right ;' 
 and the faithful creature stood aside and let Herbert pass. ' He 
 chooses my friends for me,' said Grinley with his mocking smile, 
 that might be earnest or not. ' He only barks at poor men. If 
 you had happened to be rich, you would have had a different 
 reception. I dou't know whether it is instinct or his natural snob- 
 bishness, but I never knew him make a mistake.' 
 
'GATED.' 29 
 
 * He is quite right in my case,' said Herbert stiffly. ' His instinct 
 was unerring ; he knows I have no right here, except, indeed, to 
 repay my debt, the money you were so kind to lend me at Miss 
 Bellenden's,' and he laid the sovereign, that had been burning in 
 his pocket, down on the table by Mr. Grinley's side. 
 
 ' Yes ; ah, yes — to be sure ; I had forgotten all about it. You 
 haven't been down there lately ?' 
 
 ' No,' said the other modestly ; 'I am " gated." ' 
 
 Grinley laughed — a low, unmusical, mocking laugh — and Herbert 
 reddened. 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' said Grinley, with quite a regal unbending 
 of dignity that flattered the foolish freshman immensely, ' that's 
 one of the advantages of having rooms out of college. Now 
 would you believe it, although this is my second year, I have 
 never been " gated " once during the whole time I have been in 
 residence.' 
 
 ' But you were out later than I was the other night. We left you 
 behind.' 
 
 Grinley playfully jingled some loose gold pieces in his waistcoat 
 pocket, Herbert's last sovereign among them. 
 
 ' You have much yet to learn of the ways of Cambridge,' he said, 
 with his low, cynical laugh. ' I have never found a door yet, in this 
 place or in any other, that a golden key will not open.' 
 
 Both men laughed — one because he had the magic ' Open Sesame,' 
 the other because he hadn't ; and Herbert if he had been wise, and 
 not a foolish, impressionable, and utterly weak-minded under- 
 graduate, would have summoned up courage at this juncture to go 
 away. But he only feebly remonstrated when Grinley asked him 
 to have some tea, and pointed with an idiotic smile to Grinley 'a 
 canine Mentor. 
 
 1 Oh, he allows me to choose for myself sometimes. He is always 
 willing to overcome his natural prejudices for a sufficient raison 
 d'Stre. Here, Dear Boy !' 
 
 The great creature came softly over, and put his huge paws on his 
 shoulders, looking up, with a strange intelligence, into his face. 
 Grinley spoke to him a few words in an unknown tongue, looking 
 straight into his beautiful brown eyes as he spoke, and laid his 
 hand on Herbert's arm. 
 
 Softly and cringingly, with his tail between his legs and his head 
 hanging down with an apologetic air, the great beast came over and 
 put his cold muzzle into Herbert's hand, and stretched himself out 
 at his feet. 
 
 ' You have got his confidence, Flowers, from this hour,' said his 
 master ; ' mind you never abuse it . You will find it safer to keep 
 him a friend than an enemy.' 
 
 And the lovely tawny creature sat at his feet looking up with its 
 soft, blinking eyes into his artless face, while his master drew from 
 the boy the simple story of his lif • He told him willingly enough 
 
30 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 about his school, his home, the Squire at the great house across the 
 river ; but he didn't tell him about the little mother. 
 
 ' Isn't there a son of Spurway's here ?' he asked presently, having 
 led up to the subject in the most easy, natural way in the world. 
 
 ' Yes ; Tom Spurway, at Trinity, lucky fellow !' And Herbert 
 sighed as he thought of his own meagre heritage, the musty classics, 
 and the old coach's silver inkstand. 
 
 1 Fine property, eh ?' 
 
 ' Finest in North Devon ; Sir Hugh hunts the western division ; 
 has a kennel at Fairy Cross, and the best shooting in the county.' 
 
 When he had pumped the artless lad quite dry, and extracted all 
 the information he wanted from him, he let him go, and Dear Boy 
 accompanied him gravely to the door. 
 
 ' Good-bye, Dear Boy ! good-bye, old fellow ; remember we are 
 friends !' Herbert called out, as the great creature stood watching 
 him down over the stairs. 
 
 Grinley surprised Herbert some days after this by a visit after 
 Hall. A man on his staircase — Brown by name — had found him 
 out, and, being of a cheerful and sociable turn of mind, usually 
 dropped in after Hall to have a little chat and a cup of coffee — if 
 it happened to be going — before settling down to work for the 
 night. 
 
 The reading men of the University plead a precedent for this 
 custom, handed down from old monastic times, when the old, old 
 occupants of those venerable walls used to collect together after 
 their temperate meals, in knots of three or four, for the purposes 
 of meditation. 
 
 It was not exactly for meditation that Brown sought Herbert's 
 society after Hall. The new friends had a good deal in common. 
 Both were poor, and both had come up with the laudable intention 
 to work. 
 
 Brown was very much in earnest, and he had reason to be. His 
 father, as he told Herbert in the course of their post-prandial con- 
 versations, w r as a poor country parson with seven small children, 
 and — he wasn't exactly starving himself, but he was cheerfully 
 submitting to all sorts of privations to send his eldest son to 
 Cambridge, to his own college, where he had done so well, and 
 where, with paternal fondness, he hoped his son would do better, 
 and some day win a name for himself, and a decent position, and 
 maybe, on his broad shoulders, help those little Browns at home to 
 mount the social ladder too. 
 
 Brown's shoulders were broad enough, and his intentions were 
 excellent ; but his face, or what little could be seen of it through 
 a fragrant cloud of Latakia, an atmosphere that usually hung 
 around Brown like an halo, was weak and utterly wanting in 
 purpose. It was a kind face, nevertheless — a small, round, good- 
 tempered, kindly face, surrounded with a mop of sandy hair, 
 
 He was not inappropriately christened Cherub by the men of hia 
 
'GATED.' 31 
 
 college, not only from the cherubic outline of his countenance and 
 its wholesome fresh colour, as from its peculiar trustfulness of 
 expression. 
 
 He was the most open and communicative fellow in Trinity. 
 He had already, quite confidentially, told every man on his 
 staircase that he was engaged, and that the name of his charmer 
 was ' Maria.' It was needless for him to expatiate upon the charms 
 of his Maria ; he had quite a gallery of photographic representations 
 of her — from the age of six upwards — on the walls of his room, 
 beside an album full of Marias on his table. 
 
 Brown's Maria was quite a standing toast of Trinity. 
 
 But we are keeping Mr. Grinley, of King's, waiting in the cold. 
 
 He was not alone ; Geraint had come up with him to show him 
 the way. Not that there was any danger of missing it ; he couldn't 
 go up higher, unless he went out on the roof. 
 
 There could not be anything more opposite than the two men 
 who came into Herbert's room together. Grinley was a good deal 
 older than the average undergraduates of Cambridge — older and 
 more worn, not with the honest wear of 'work,' which leaves its 
 mark like a refiner's fire, but the ineffaceable stamp of a dissipated 
 youth. His chin was clean-shaven, and his thin lips were shaded 
 by a dark moustache, and his bright dark eyes were discreetly veil &'\ 
 beneath a languid indolent manner that seldom allowed him to look 
 anyone in the face. The only striking feature in his handsome, 
 impassive face was his teeth, which were remarkably white and 
 large, and slightly prominent. 
 
 He was studiously careful and neat in his dress, and wore, not at 
 all ostentatiously, magnificent jewellery. An opal pin, surrounded 
 with very brilliant diamonds, blazed on his shirt-front, and he wore 
 a ring to match on the little finger of his left hand. 
 
 Herbert noted these details — insignificant to other men — with 
 a sense of their incongruousness in his own mean room. He 
 received his visitors in a shamefaced, embarrassed way, cautioning 
 them to beware of the beams, and recommending them to keep as 
 nearly in the middle of the room as possible, as both being rather 
 above the average height, it was the only part of the room where 
 they could stand upright in safety. 
 
 There was only one easy-chair in the place, which Brown 
 already occupied, and the crippled couch Herbert had taken off 
 i'rom the former tenant. He had got used to its peculiarities by 
 this time, and adapted himself to its defects ; a broken spring or 
 two, more or less, was of no account when he had got used to it ; 
 but a tendency the back legs had to shift their position and 
 suddenly collapse rendered it difficult for anyone but the owner 
 iimseif to preserve a dignified balance upon it. 
 
 Herbert pushed forward a couple of hard Windsor-chairs to his 
 risitors. 
 
 1 I'm afraid,' he said, with a feeble smile, seeing them make for 
 
?2 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 the unreliable couch, ' that is not a very comfortable seat ; it has s. 
 game leg.' 
 
 1 Be accurate, my dear fellow,' interrupted Brown, correcting him 
 — ' two.' 
 
 ' Very good — very good,' murmured Grinley, showing all his 
 shining teeth, while Geraint laughed good-humouredly, and took 
 the uninviting Windsor chair. 
 
 The other followed his example, and took a chair the other side 
 of the table, with a perspective view of the fire, which was the only 
 cheerful thing in the room. 
 
 From this position, which, as a set-off, included a decided draught 
 from the ill-fitting casement behind, Grinley took a rapid survey of 
 the room. 
 
 There was very little to survey. 
 
 The walls of the poor scholar's den were quite bare, with the 
 exception of a few college notices, stuck up with pins — he had re- 
 moved the unique sporting portraits (minus the heads) left by the 
 late tenant — and the floor of the room was nearly bare, too, as that 
 portion of the large Axminster rug described in the inventory as 
 ' five holes and a fringe ' had been judiciously foreshortened by the 
 bed-maker, and now covered a limited space by the hearth. 
 
 There were no pots, silver or pewter, stuck up in conspicuous 
 places, no knick-knacks or brackets in the corners (they would have 
 occupied a position very near the ground, as the gradient of the 
 ceiling was curiously steep) ; there were no five o'clock tea-tables 
 or jaunty chairs lying in wait for the unwary. It was as arid a 
 desert as any scholar could desire. 
 
 GrinJey smiled — a slow, quiet smile, that only curled the corners 
 of his mouth. It certainly was not worth while to sit any longer 
 in a draught. 
 
 He dragged his chair over to the fire, and rubbed his hands 
 meditatively in the grateful warmth. As he rubbed them, the opal 
 on his finger gleamed blood-red in the firelight. He turned it 
 round in an absent manner, as if it were an evil-eye, upon each of 
 the men who sat in a circle round the hearth. 
 
 It was pale and colourless when he turned it upon Herbert, and 
 warmed up into a dull red heat when it fell upon Geraint ; but 
 when it turned in the direction of Brown — simple, easy-going 
 Brown — it leaped up into a blood-red flame. 
 
 He tried the experiment twice, in his absent way, with the same 
 result. With a gambler's acceptance of fate, he ought, if he had 
 been wise, to have taken the warning, and let the foolish under- 
 graduate go. 
 
 But who is wise in time ? One sees things so much clearer after 
 the event. Grinley sat on, and the opal flashed its warning in 
 vain. 
 
 He took out a cigarette-case and a pack of cards from bis 
 pocket ; and presently the foolish boys, who ought to have been at 
 
'GATED.' 33 
 
 their work — the curfew had rung long ago — were deep in tha 
 mysteries, the little innocent mysteries, of nap. 
 
 For some time there were no great losses on either side ; and 
 presently Geraint, who was reckless, and indifferent as to the 
 extent of his losses, suggested higher stakes, and with the utmost 
 complacency lost ten pounds. 
 
 Herbert and Brown looked across the table at each other with a 
 certain stricken look. Grinley surprised it half-way. 
 
 ' Is nap a game you can be cheated at ?' asked the Cherub inno- 
 cently. 
 
 Grinley's brow darkened. 
 
 ' I never knew gentlemen cheat at nap,' he said crushingly, with 
 a swift suspicious look at Brown ; ' nor in any other game, for the 
 matter of that.' 
 
 ' Oh, I didn't mean anything,' said Brown meekly. 
 
 Grinley was so far above showing malice for any covert sugges- 
 tion there might be in Brown's remark, that when he rose to go, 
 that candid and ingenuous undergraduate was three sovereigns and 
 some odd shillings richer for his visit. That was heaping coals of 
 fire in earnest. 
 
 The fickle goddess Fortune had also visited Herbert to the tune 
 of a couple of very welcome guineas. 
 
 The two foolish fellows rejoiced over their first success — when 
 Grinley had gone, and nearly killed himself in going down 
 Herbert's staircase — and spent the remainder of the evening, and 
 far into the night, in making abstruse calculations into the odds of 
 nap, allowing a fixed percentage in favour of luck. 
 
 Brown, who was of a very sanguine temperament, went so far as 
 to start a theory that, by judicious and systematic playing, a better 
 income could be gained at nap than in the Church ; and further to 
 illustrate his theory, he went to bed, and slept so late the follow- 
 ing morning that he missed his college chapel and two divinity 
 lectures. 
 
 Fortune, that fickle goddess, every philosopher knows, is never 
 to be counted upon. She lures a man on with those shining un- 
 trustable eyes of hers, and then she deserts him. She only treated 
 Herbert as she treats all the rest of her votaries, especially the 
 weak ones who haven't sufficient backbone to keep themselves out 
 of mischief. 
 
 It was the old, old story. Herbert was so intoxicated at winning, 
 so lured on with his first success — the devil's success, which he 
 metes out so handsomely to beginners — that he plunged eagerly, 
 night after night, into the exciting game of nap. 
 
 It didn't matter much while he and Brown played alone, while 
 the night winds whistled eerily round his attic ; they had only 
 their golden first-fruits to lose, and this changed hands so frequently 
 that Brown's three guineas were as often in Herbert's pocket as 
 that industrious scholar's two guineas in Brown's. But when they 
 
 3 
 
34 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 carried their luck with them a couple of floors lower, things were 
 altered. Maybe Luck objects to every change that is not of her 
 own making. Grinley gave Geraint his revenge a few nights later, 
 and the two poor scholars were of the party. 
 
 Herbert staked his little all, and lost it, and Geraint good- 
 humouredly insisted on lending him five sovereigns, pour Ven- 
 courager. He staked these and lost. Well, the world did not 
 exactly come to an end, but there was a great singing in his ears, 
 as if a cannon had gone off and would never cease reverberating, 
 and he found his eyes suddenly full of tears. He had just remem- 
 bered the little mother at home, who at that very moment was 
 most likely on her knees praying for him with all her heart ! — and 
 — and he was wasting her poor little substance, the result of, oh ! 
 so much self-denial and economy, in riotous living ! 
 
 He remembered this when it was too late, and a big lump came 
 up in his throat and his eyes filled with sudden tears of contrition, 
 and he rose unsteadily from the gaming-table, where Brown waa 
 winning hilariously, and left the room. 
 
 Grinley rose, too, and followed him. The staircase was dimly 
 lighted, as college staircases are wont to be, but Grinley found his 
 man before he had got half-way up his ladder. He laid his hand 
 heavily on the boy's shoulder, and turned him round. 
 
 ' This kind of thing doesn't do for you, Flowers,' he said not un- 
 kindly. ' You haven't a fortune to lose ; but you have what I shall 
 never have — God help me ! — a name to win. Take my advice : 
 don't do it again.' And before Herbert could find words to answer 
 him, he had put the money he had won from him back into the 
 boy's hand, and had disappeared down the dark stairs. 
 
 Herbert didn't play nap any more that term ; and Brown, whose 
 lightly-won guineas were burning dreadful holes in his pocket, 
 bought presents for Maria and each of her five sisters, and for the 
 seven young Browns in the dear old country vicarage, and went 
 home for his Christmas vacation quite happy ! 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 DULCE DOMUMl 
 
 Herbert went down at Christmas, and spent the short vacation 
 at Bideford. He travelled third-class by the same train, as it 
 happened, as that hopeful scion of nobility, Tom Spurway. 
 
 The fellow-commoner, who travelled in a saloon carriage, with a 
 foot-warmer and a mountain of rugs, and wore a fearful and won- 
 derful thing in travelling-wraps, and bought newspapers at every 
 station and smoked cigars on every platform where the train 
 b topped, never saw Herbert the whole way down. He couldn't 
 afford to, for Lord Francis Wallop, Lord Portsmouth's third son, 
 
DULCE DOMUMl 35 
 
 was travelling with him, and he couldn't be expected to notice ' a 
 confounded beggar of a sizar.' Lord Francis left him at Barnstaple, 
 and then he became suddenly conscious of Herbert's existence, and 
 bawled out to him, as he stood beating his arms for warmth on that 
 bleak, inhospitable platform, to give him a light. 
 
 Herbert civilly reminded him that he wasnt the porter, and con- 
 tinued his exercise, whereupon he ' confounded tbe beggar's impu- 
 dence !' during the remainder of the journey. 
 
 The little mother was waiting for Herbert at the Bideford rail- 
 way station, and threw her arms around him, and kissed him before 
 all the porters, and would insist upon carrying his rug and umbrella. 
 An empty carriage with a pair of horses, and brilliant lamps, and a 
 tall footman, and a broad coachman, and a foot warmer and addi- 
 tional rugs awaited the representative of the house of Spurway. 
 
 The carriage passed Herbert and his mother on the road, and the 
 wheels bespattered them with mud, and the lamps, which shone 
 like eyes of flame through the darkness, made a path of fire before 
 them as they trudged merrily homeward, Herbert shouldering his 
 bag and Lucy proudly carrying his sticks. 
 
 It was very remarkable how the place had changed during those 
 few weeks of absence. How small and low the white-thatched 
 Bideford cottages had grown ! how mean the little old-fashioned 
 shops on the quay ! and even the fine old bridge was shorter by 
 two arches than it had been when he went away. 
 
 At least Herbert thought so ; but the greatest change of all was 
 in the dear old home of his childhood, which had suddenly collapsed, 
 shrunk up as it were, into half its accustomed size. 
 
 Everything had dwarfed, inside as well as out, and grown 
 suddenly shabby and mean. The narrow walls and homely hearth, 
 sending oul into the road its ruddy glow of welcome, had grown 
 narrower and homelier than ever. The worn old-fashioned furni- 
 ture, that had been new when the old coach married, had grown all 
 at once shabby and faded. There were no tender memories of the 
 dead to endear it to the Cambridge undergraduate, and he saw it, 
 in these first moments of disillusion, in all its naked homeliness. 
 
 Only the little mother was unchanged. Herbert could not help 
 acknowledging, as he sat talking in the firelight, with her hand in 
 his, that he had not seen a woman in Cambridge, not even that 
 august personage, the Master's wife, to say nothing of the wives of 
 the dons and the professors and the Vice-Chancellor, who was half 
 so lovely, and as near approaching perfection, as his own little 
 mother. 
 
 And he was quite right ! 
 
 Nevertheless he awoke up in a very ungracious state of mind on 
 the morning following his arrival, and looked out of the casement 
 of the little chamber of his childhood on the dear familiar scenes 
 with a dreadful sense of humiliation. 
 
 It was a very unchristian and unreasonable spirit to return hom*7 
 
 3—2 
 
36 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 in after such a few weeks of absence, and reflected discredit upon 
 the teaching of that religious foundation of which he was a 
 member. 
 
 The little white town of Bideford lay beneath his window, very 
 peaceful and quiet in the gray December morning ; and the light 
 mists were slowly rising from the river, and beyond lay the thickly- 
 wooded hills, and the wide deer-park sloping steeply up to the 
 great house. 
 
 Herbert turned away impatiently, and moodily descended the 
 steep cottage stairs to begin the new life that awaited him. 
 
 The morning light revealed the leanness and the bareness of that 
 poor home only more fully. There were no longer any roses on 
 the porch to cover its nakedness ; no homely flowers to brighten up 
 the little bleak garden plot. The walls of Lucy's best parlour were 
 stained with damp and mildew, and it had a faint odour as if it 
 had been long unused, and the carpet was worn and faded, and the 
 fire burnt unwillingly in the small old-fashioned grate. 
 
 Lucy did not tell him that there had been no fire in that dreary 
 little bow- windowed room, that looked out into the wet garden, 
 since he had been away, that she had sat in the kitchen beyond, 
 with the small maid, all through the winter months to save fire 
 and candle. 
 
 Since the widow's household had been diminished she had cur- 
 tailed her poor little housekeeping expenses in order that the small 
 sums saved should be devoted to her boy. She had grown miserly 
 towards her own needs in order to minister to Herbert's. 
 Is not love incomplete without sacrifice ? 
 
 It was a very gloomy vacation for Herbert. He shunned the 
 busy streets of the town ; he had no pleasure in the society of his 
 former schoolfellows ; he slunk away, as one ashamed, from the 
 notice of the neighbouring gentry, when they were so conde- 
 scending as to recognise the existence of the handsome under- 
 graduate. But most of all he shunned the public highways, where 
 he was likely at any time to meet the people from the great house. 
 Not that he did not walk out, day after day, with a secret tremor 
 of hope in his heart that he should see one face from the Court that 
 would repay him, in one brief glance, for all the weary vigils of 
 hope and despair that he persuaded himself he had been keeping. 
 The foolish boy used to hang about the country lanes in the 
 gloaming of the raw December days, on the chance of getting a 
 sight of his Dulcinea, as she rode back from hunting, without being 
 recognised. 
 
 He had his wish sometimes, and would turn into a gate in time 
 to see the gay cavalcade of huntsmen and dogs, and the noble 
 master and his daughter in her scarlet habit, sweep by. 
 
 Her ladyship's carriage crossed his path one day, when he was 
 more absent-minded than usual, and the broad coachman flicked his 
 whip at him to get out of the way. 
 
DULCE DOMUM! 37 
 
 Herbert looked up, and seeing whose the carriage was, walked 
 more leisurely than ever in the very front of the galloping horses. 
 
 John Thomas had them well in hand, but he grumbled quite 
 audibly at the reckless youth ; and when Herbert raised his hat 
 gloomily to the ladies in the carriage, Lady Millicent stared blankly 
 at him through her gold eyeglass, and enquired of her daughter 
 'who that extraordinary person was who tried to upset the 
 earriage ?' 
 
 She sent him next day, however, an invitation to a ball at 
 Bratton Court — the tenants' ball ! 
 
 Herbert knew exactly what this meant. Not only Farmer Hodge 
 and his rosy-cheeked daughters, and the tenantry, hik'h and low, on 
 'he Bratton Estate, and the honest tradespeople of Bideford who 
 had the honour of serving the household of the Court, but the upper 
 servants were included among the guests at the tenants' ball. 
 
 Herbert fumed, in the bitterness of his spirit, at this gratuitous 
 insult. He would have written a reply full of delicate irony, and 
 pointed with the finest wit, declining the honour ; but Lucy, with 
 tears in her eyes, begged him to remember that they had long eaten 
 of the crumbs of that liberal table, and that her slender provision 
 for future needs depended upon her ladyship's bounty. The 
 deeply-wounded undergraduate fumed and raged inwardly, and 
 finally tore up the missive ; and Lucy wrote a pretty little note of 
 thanks, declining the honour my lady and Miss Muriel were so kind 
 as to do them. 
 
 Herbert relieved his mind after the event by reading to his 
 mother the account of ' The Festivities at Bratton Court ' which 
 appeared in the columns of the Bideford Chronicle, interspersed 
 with a pungent and satirical commentary that mightily relieved his 
 over-charged feelings, if it did nothing else. 
 
 It was quite delightful to see the gloomy relish with which he 
 read the interesting account of Lady Millicent's condescension in 
 opening the ball with the steward, while Sir Hugh led off with the 
 portly housekeeper, and Mister Tom favoured the children's pretty 
 governess ; and Miss Muriel — well, she might have danced with 
 him if he had been there — consoled herself with the Honourable 
 Plantagenet Glossop, who was staying at the Court. 
 
 Little Julie, the gouvernante, came to drink tea with Lucy the 
 following day. She came to drink tea with her fellow-instit utricenow. 
 She had grown ever so much prettier, this innocent, artless Julie, 
 in the few months that had elapsed since Herbert used to visit her 
 by way of the back stairs. There was a deeper light in her dark 
 eyes, demurely shaded by sweeping black eyelashes, that threw 
 quite a purple shadow on the delicate peach-bloom of her cheeks. 
 
 And her fringe ? Well, her fringe was more pronounced, and 
 airanged more artistically — perhaps Marie, my lady's own maid, 
 had given her a few lessons. It was the most tantalizing, be- 
 wildering fringe. If you happened to look over her shoulder, or 
 
38 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 she looked over yours — a pretty trick she had, in her artless way — 
 it got in your eyes and tickled your cheeks, and got mixed up with 
 your whiskers if you happened to be of the male sex, and sent 
 creepy-crawly sensations down your spine, as if it were charged 
 with electricity, like the fur of a black cat is reputed to be. At 
 least it gave Herbert that uncomfortable sensation as she bent over 
 him to read the account of the festivities at Bratton in the Bide- 
 ford Chronicle. 
 
 It was no use his making room for her, and craning his neck on 
 one side so as — well, not to embarrass her. He couldn't get away 
 from the fringe, do what he would ; and her warm breath was on 
 his cheek, and the faint suggestive perfume of patchouli steeped his 
 senses like a narcotic. 
 
 How full of esprit and innocent mirth she was, and with what 
 delightful humour she recounted the droll incidents of the tenants' 
 ball ! She was really quite inimitable when she portrayed portly 
 Sir Hugh and the buxom housekeeper, and her ladyship, tall and 
 stately, and the steward, who was the smallest and broadest of men, 
 and lame to boot, opening the ball. She did the whole thing to the 
 life in the middle of the room, .till Herbert laughed as he had not 
 laughed since he had ceased to be a boy. 
 
 She told him a great deal about the company staying at the Court, 
 the Honourable Plantagenet, 'who was Meester Tom's boosom 
 friend,' and Lord Francis, both of whom were deeply smitten by 
 the very ordinary charms of Miss Muriel. 
 
 1 Ah, you men, you have no sense !' Julie concluded, shrugging 
 her pretty shoulders in her expressive foreign way. ' Tou don't 
 know when a woman is chic. Tou admire a figure without grace, 
 a face without complexion, couleur, expression ; you adore blue 
 eyes, like one enfant — red hair, coarse hands, coarse feet — bah I 
 you have no sense !' 
 
 Herbert accepted the rebuke meekly ; no doubt, like the rest, he 
 had been guilty of worshipping the wrong woman. His idol was 
 clay — very coarse clay, maybe : women find out these things 
 quicker than men — but he did not love her one whit the less for it. 
 
 Julie came pretty often during those dark winter days, brighten- 
 ing up the bare room, and for the time dispelling the gioom that 
 was settling over the boy's spirits — that Byronic gloom that, Lara- 
 like, rejects sympathy, and expresses itself in turn-down collars, 
 and a sombre, preoccupied cast of countenance, not unusual at a 
 certain period of youth. 
 
 He liked Julie to come. Her little scraps of news from the 
 great house fed the passion that was consuming him, or that he 
 thought was consuming him. He always led her to talk upon one 
 subject — a subject of which he could never tire — Muriel Spurway 
 and her lovers. 
 
 The little governess knew quite well, her ladyship's own maid, 
 had told her, that she had rejected Lord Francis, who was a 
 
DULCE DOMUM! 39 
 
 younger son, and that my lady was very anxious that she should be 
 civil to Meester Tom's friend, ' the young Milord Plantagenet, who 
 was coming in to so vere great richesse.' 
 
 Herbert listened greedily while she retailed all the backstpJr 
 news of the Court, and ground his heel into the worn hearthrug, 
 and laughed dismally when she was gone, with honest shame and 
 self-contempt. 
 
 He was losing caste with himself every day. He despised him- 
 self for listening to this woman's vulgar gossip, and strode off 
 moodily to long, solitary rambles upon the far-stretching sandy 
 burrows by the gray wintry sea. He wrote a tragedy at this time 
 in Greek, which relieved his feelings immensely. He read it to 
 Lucy by the light of the solitary candle by the kitchen fire, and 
 mouthed it so solemnly, and with such tragic effect, that the small 
 maid, who was their companion in these evening gatherings, threw 
 her apron over her head and began to howl. 
 
 Lucy could not view without much inward fear and trembling 
 these unwonted moods of depression and gloom in her darling. 
 She never even faintly guessed at their true cause, but put it down 
 in her simple heart to some trouble that had befallen him at that 
 terrible University. 
 
 She had suffered herself there. What high hopes and crushing 
 disappointments she had suffered beneath those frowning college 
 walls. Heaven only knew ! She had buried them long ago 
 beneath that little white stone, all aslant now, in Grantchester 
 Churchyard. But the poor scholar who lay sleeping there,"despite 
 all his failures and disappointments, had never been subject to 
 these strange moods of dejection and gloom ; there was nothing 
 morbid in that bright, sanguine nature, that was buoyed up to the 
 last with dazzling visions of success to the very gate of failure. 
 
 Perhaps these lowering shades of gloom and despair are the 
 peculiar atmosphere of genius. 
 
 Lucy did her best to brighten up the poor home, and make the 
 boy's brief holiday less lonely and sad. Her own society she knew 
 was dull and wearisome after his gay college life, so she encouraged 
 that demure little puss Julie, whom she disliked, and distrusted 
 in her heart, to make the long winter evenings pass more pleasantly 
 to the gloomy undergraduate. 
 
 Julie bore with the boy's uncertain humour with delightful 
 good-nature. She had sharper eyes than his mother ; and she coaxed 
 him, and petted him, and adored him in her artless foreign way, 
 and looked up to him as a miracle of cleverness and learning, so 
 that it was no wonder his foolish head was- quite turned with her 
 innocent adulation. 
 
 His spirits rose on these occasions. Who does not thaw beneath 
 the warm breath of admiration — melt insensibly beneath the soft 
 voices of praise ? At such times it seemed to him that his hope- 
 less passion was not worth the fuel it consumed — that this tender 
 
40 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 creature, who was ready at any moment to flutter at his feet, was 
 more worthy of his boyish love. 
 
 In those delightful walks beneath the stars, or on wild stormy 
 nights, when it was necessary to enfold Julie in his own scanty 
 wraps, and gather her in very closely beneath a single umbrella, 
 when he escorted her back to the entrance of the great house, the 
 foolish fellow would be beguiled into saying all sorts of pretty 
 speeches, and pressing with unwonted warmth the little hand that 
 clung so tenderly to his arm. 
 
 The only wonder was that he didn't say more ; it was not for 
 lack of opportunity. 
 
 He never committed himself in these evening rambles, though 
 he went quite as far as he well could go without doing so — perhaps 
 farther ; and Julie was always on the watch to catch him, but he 
 didn't give her the chance. 
 
 He went no farther, indeed, than the entrance to Bratton Court 
 with her ; and the timid , fluttering little creature, with many 
 innocent expressions of misgiving, would scurry away beneath the 
 shrubs like a frightened rabbit. 
 
 But Julie did not run very far. She would stop when she had 
 got out of sight of the lodge-gate, and, looking back in the 
 direction of her retreating swain, indulge in gestures curiously 
 expressive of scornful disdain, snapping her fingers and tossing 
 her pretty head. She didn't at all mind the rain then, or snow 
 or whatever happened to be coming down through the trees ; and 
 she had a habit of muttering softly to herself, ' Wait a minit ! 
 wait a minit 1' and she would walk leisurely back to the house, 
 taking a strange kind of satisfaction in getting wet through. 
 
 No ; Julie was not taken in by the boy's pretty speeches ; she 
 saw through the flimsy veil of sentiment, with those sharp eyes of 
 hers, shaded so demurely beneath the sweeping black lashes, that 
 his brave, simple, honest heart was untouched. 
 
 She knew, poor lonely little Julie ! the genuine thing when she 
 saw it. 
 
 But Herbert did not always go home, like an obedient spaniel, 
 when she dismissed him at the lodge-gate. He would loiter in the 
 shadow of the trees, looking gloomily across the park at the great 
 house, where there were lights shining in every window, and think 
 of the days, that seemed so long ago, when he would part the 
 rhododendrons and watch Muriel Spurway among her lovers on the 
 lawn. The time had not come for him to go up to the front door 
 yet ; and, as he turned gloomily away from the contemplation of 
 the great house, a voice would sound out of the darkness — 
 a whisper steal through the trees, ' Wait a minute ! wait a minute !' 
 
 The voice was familiar, but strange, for there was a tone of 
 triumph and defiance in it that was new to him. 
 
 Was it prophetic ? He would go home through the darkness, 
 with the rain pattering down upon him, softly whispering to him- 
 
DULCE DOMUM! 41 
 
 self, ' Wait a minute 1' as Dick Whittington may have done when 
 he retraced his steps from Highgate, and the bells were making 
 strange music in his ears. 
 
 What a prophecy to a ragged little scullion ! ' Turn again, 
 Whittington, Lord Mayor of London !' Surely the promise bore 
 the seed of the fulfilment ! 
 
 ' Wait a minit !' It was a human voice that spoke here, and 
 there was nothing said about being Mayor of Bideford ; but 
 Herbert went on his way with a strange mysterious Io Pcean slowly 
 swelling in his heart. Surely his time would come by-and-by ; he 
 had only to work, and ' wait a minit.' 
 
 Herbert went back to Cambridge the next morning. The sun had 
 risen gloriously over the purple hills, and there was a shining light 
 upon the distant sea, and all the mists that had hung for weeks 
 over this damp, green West-Country had lifted, and the world 
 spread out fresh and fair before him. 
 
 He remembered, as the Parliamentary train, with its freight of 
 third-class passengers, steamed slowly out of the station, and Lucy, 
 standing among the early market-people on the platform, waved a 
 tender farewell to the dear face at the window, that she could not 
 see through her tears : he remembered with a pang of contrition 
 how tender and self-sacrificing her love was, and how selfish and 
 unworthy his return ! 
 
 Her benediction followed him as she returned to the poor home 
 where he had chafed behind the galling bars of poverty. It looked 
 very lonely without him. The door of his little room was open, 
 and on the floor was strewn the litter and debris of packing, and 
 the impression of his head was fresh upon the pillow. Lucy knelt 
 down beside it, and buried her wet face on the vacant pillow, and 
 prayed for her boy with strong supplication and tears. 
 
 It was the old tender story of the importunate widow storming 
 heaven's-gate, and taking no denial, and surely the petition was not 
 in vain ! 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 WAIT A MINUTE ! 
 
 * Resistless burns the fervour of renown, 
 Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.' 
 
 Herbert returned to Trinity with a settled determination to work 
 and — wait a minute. 
 
 It might be a long minute ; minutes do vary : there are long 
 ones in all lives ; while some, alas ! are winged ; but however long 
 this particular minute might be, he was quite prepared to wait. 
 
 He shut himself up in that bare room that looked out upon the 
 leads, and sported his oak, and was deaf to all the blandishments of 
 
42 A FELLOW OF TRINITY, 
 
 that pleasant stream of University life that was bubbling in the quad 
 below. The stream never reached up so high as Herbert's staircase, 
 and few men troubled themselves about the poor sizar who kept in 
 that exalted region sacred to the college cats. 
 
 Brown had come back with the same laudable intention. Maria 
 had fired his ambition with a highly-coloured picture from life of 
 the felicity of the friend of her bosom, who had recently married 
 a curate, and begun housekeeping on the bewildering sum-total of 
 one hundred and twenty pounds a year. 
 
 With this delightful vision before his eyes, Brown had come 
 back with a Spartan determination to work. Maria had given him 
 her last photograph, which stood in a magnificent frame upon his 
 table, at his elbow, so that the reward of his labour should be 
 always before his eyes. 
 
 He got accustomed to it after a time, and used to knock it over 
 with his books, and it would lie face downwards for days, and the 
 men of his staircase used to play strange tricks with it, and sub- 
 stituted an improper ballet-girl's likeness for it, and Brown never 
 found it out, but went on thinking that Maria was there watching 
 him, as he used to assure her she was in his letters, though she 
 would have blushed dreadfully to see the indecent creature in the 
 scanty skirts that the men of his acquaintance used to introduce 
 to strangers as ' Brown's Maria.' 
 
 He had promised the dear girl to abjure cards and wines, and all 
 naughty, wicked college ways that stood in the way of that dazzling 
 vision of a curacy, and a wife, and a hundred and twenty pounds a 
 year. There is a long avenue at Trinity, with the spire of a 
 church faintly visible ever so far off in the distance, that is 
 supposed to typify a University career. Brown used to walk up 
 and down that avenue craning his neck to see the spire ; but it was 
 very seldom in sight in those foggy February days. 
 
 He had made a discovery during the vacation, or Maria had made 
 it — that there was nothing like method. He had tried every other 
 way of working and failed, and now — it was rather late to begin — 
 he was going to be methodical. 
 
 He wrote out a set of rules which excited the wonder and awe of 
 his staircase, and arranged the order of spending every hour of the 
 twenty-four. Herbert copied them, so did several other men, and 
 hung them up in their rooms in a prominent place. 
 
 The men of Trinity, if they are nothing else, are consistent, and 
 as they consistently began the programme of the day's work at 
 noon, they were severely exercised during the available hours of 
 the twenty-four in trying to overtake seven o'clock, the hour set for 
 beginning work. They all gave it up, including Brown, before the 
 end of the week ; but Herbert clung tenaciously to his old custom 
 of attending morning chapel. He tried very hard to get Brown, 
 the originator of the great scheme, to put in an appearance, but 
 failed after the first morning. 
 
WAIT A MINUTE/ 43 
 
 The Dean had remarked unkindly about Brown's braces, which 
 unfortunately were of a conspicuous colour, and which, owing to 
 his hasty toilet, were not unfrequently to be seen hanging down in 
 two scarlet lines beneath his surplice, to the amusement of the 
 ingenuous freshmen as he walked up the chapel. 
 
 Brown objected to the Dean's interference in so personal a 
 matter, and refused to give him a further opportunity for ill- 
 natured criticism. 
 
 It was unfortunate for Brown, as he was reading for a degree in 
 theology, and was going into the Church, and the irregularity of 
 his attendance at chapeljhad already called forth various epistolary 
 remonstrances from the Dean. 
 
 G-eraint's nice little parties after Hall were not so frequent now, 
 as he was training for the Lent races, and his cox had cut off his 
 wines, and restricted him to two pipes a day, and wouldn't allow 
 him to be out of bed after ten. 
 
 In the raw February mornings he and Herbert used to do their 
 half-hour's running in Fencer's before breakfast, and come back all 
 aglow and with healthy young appetites needlessly whetted by the 
 keen morning air : Geraint to a substantial training breakfast with 
 the men of his boat, where the inevitable oatmeal porridge was 
 followed by juicy beefsteaks, washed down with beer instead of tea. 
 Herbert could smell the grateful aroma of Geraint's viands up in 
 his garret — smells will ascend — while he sat feasting off his meagre 
 commons, and reading { Salmon's Conies,' which had the additional 
 advantage, as a reading breakfast, of being as difficult of digestion 
 as the beefsteaks the training men were consuming below. 
 
 Herbert had done a little tubbing when he first came up, and had 
 even been in his college trial eights ; but he had given it up 
 regretfully, as poor men must give up many things, when he found 
 that his slender little purse, where there were so few coins to 
 elbow each other, and his reading were both unequal to the stress 
 laid upon them. 
 
 He had paid his subscription, it is true, to the University Boat 
 Club, and adopted its blazer ; and he had also provided himself with 
 the necessary boating flannels and the blazer of his own particular 
 college, and a pleasing variety of other distinctive articles of Uni- 
 versity undress — and he had not paid for them. 
 
 He couldn't go to the Bellenden's ' at homes,' and win back his 
 lost sovereign, for he hadn't a dress-suit. 
 
 He had begun to realise bitterly the hourly mortification of 
 being poor. He told himself, with unbecoming impatience, that he 
 had no business there in the society of rich men, that the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge was no place for him, and most of all 
 Trinity. 
 
 Other men may have told themselves the same, and yet, un- 
 daunted by the bitter truth, climbed to the highest round of that 
 steep ladder that men call Fame. 
 
44 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Whewell, in his highlows and homely-cut garments, fresh from 
 the carpenter's shop, no doubt had the same delightful experience, 
 and the memory of those impecunious undergraduate days was 
 still fresh in his noble mind beneath the rustling silk gown of the 
 Master of Trinity. 
 
 There was one reflection that reconciled the poor scholar to the 
 Bacrifices he made so grudgingly — that the surrender of so many 
 valuable hours in the short working diem to the exigences of train- 
 ing would have been that feather in the balance that would turn 
 the scales in the Tripos. 
 
 The grapes, undoubtedly, were sour ! 
 
 So he sat at home with his oak sported, while ot. " p men played 
 football with their chances of high place and distinc 
 
 When the Lent races were rowed he ran beside hi L on the 
 
 towing-path, and witnessed that ignominious bump tnat brought 
 tears into the ej r es of every Trinity man on the bank, and saw -the 
 beautiful slender thing that bore the colours of the Second Trinity 
 take a lower place on the river. 
 
 He told himself with becoming modesty that if he had been 
 in the boat the disaster would not have happened, and the college 
 would not have had to bear the humiliation of a defeat. The 
 Second Trinity had been steadily going down for several yeara 
 past, and men of a gloomy cast, as they walked back to their 
 college — not behind the flag to a delightful ' orgy ' — calculated with 
 mathematical nicety how many more races it would take to get 
 bumped off the river altogether. 
 
 G-eraint, after all his training, was not in the boat ; he had 
 injured his shoulder at football a few days before the event came 
 off, and at the last moment was scratched. 
 
 He howled over the defeat with Herbert and the unhappy cox, 
 who was reported to have fainted on the bank, and with them 
 arrived at the unanimous conclusion, delivered with much heat and 
 superfluous oratory, that ' the college was going to the deuce !' 
 
 It may have been this awful prediction that animated the young 
 freshman, when he ought to have been at work and preparing for 
 his college exams, to suddenly begin training and enter himself as 
 one of the representatives of his college in the University Athletic 
 Sports that came off at Fenner's at the end of the term. 
 
 The athletes of Trinity looked coldly on : they were generally 
 asleep in their warm beds when Herbert did his running in the 
 shivery twilight of the raw winter mornings. He seldom prac- 
 tised with the others, and many men knew him only by sight, or by 
 meeting him at lectures, or Hall, or chapel, or poring over books in 
 the college library. 
 
 The day appointed for the C.U.A.C. Sports was brilliant. The 
 sun had been out of town, so far as Cambridge was concerned, for 
 a week, and now shone out quite unexpectedly from a sky that, to 
 do honour to the occasion, had donned the University colour. 
 
WAIT A MINUTE! 45 
 
 The wide ring was crowded with eager faces, but room had been 
 made in front for the ladies — wives and daughters of the dons, and 
 men connected with the University, mostly : portly matrons and 
 tender young things timidly seeking shelter beneath their ample 
 wings from attractive wolves in undergraduate clothing. Grave, 
 be-spectacled girl-graduates from the neighbouring colleges of 
 Girton and Newnham were there in their quaint old-world gowns, 
 looking as if they had stepped out of Kate Greenaway's charming 
 pictures. 
 
 It helped the youthful gladiators, this consciousness that bright 
 eyes were watching them as they stepped into the ring, and saw 
 behind the ropes, if not exactly — 
 
 ' A bank of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire,' 
 
 certainly pretty girls enough to make the tournament worth the 
 winning. 
 
 Some of the ladies wore the colours of their respective colleges 
 modestly peeping out among their furs and laces. There was 
 quite a group of girls who wore the colours of Trinity. 
 
 Herbert saw them as he stood inside the ring glowing, when he 
 ought to have been shivering, in the — ahem ! — very spare clothing 
 worn by members of the C.U.A.C. 
 
 There were eight men entered for the event that Herbert had 
 just stripped for — the high jump — another Trinity man being 
 among the number, his old neighbour and fellow-countryman, Tom 
 Spurway. 
 
 A Johnian led splendidly, with five feet clear, and the rest 
 followed with varying success. Inch by inch the bar was raised, 
 and the number of competitors fell off to four when it reached five 
 feet eight ; and still among them were two men of Trinity — the 
 rest had- modestly resumed their overcoats and retired from the 
 contest. 
 
 The first man missed, but the Johnian and Spurway again 
 cleared it, and the later was heard to murmur, as Herbert came 
 blushingly forward : 
 
 ' It's quite outwagious, that beggar going in !' 
 
 Nevertheless, Herbert cleared the bar splendidly, and a murmur 
 of applause ran through the barriers. 
 
 The bar was raised another inch, and the number of competitors 
 was reduced to three. The Johnian went at it first, in fine style, 
 but came down ignominiously on the other side — bar and all. 
 Spurway took it easily, and cleared it, and the murmur round tho 
 barriers again rose to a roar. 
 
 Herbert came modestly forward, with his accustomed little dance 
 by the way, and again cleared it. 
 
 The bar was raised another inch, and the two men of Trinity 
 stood out alone. 
 
 Herbert remembered, in that brief moment as he stood inside 
 
46 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 the ring waiting for his turn, that when he made the record of the 
 high jump at his old school sports Muriel Spurway had been one of 
 the spectators ; and he looked round the ring, with a strange thrill 
 of expectation, for a woman's encouraging glance. 
 
 He had not far to look. The colours of Trinity caught his eye, 
 and the wearer was the Trinity Lily. 
 
 She was looking at him now as she was not accustomed to look 
 at him in the college chapel. 
 
 Her eyes, which he never remembered to have seen before, were 
 smiling upon him, and her white girlish face, so very, very white 
 and lily-like against the old dark oak of the stalls, was flushed 
 now, and her lips were open, as he came forward — after Spurway, 
 who had come down three times, bringing the bar with him — as if 
 she were saying : 
 
 ' Wait a minute !' 
 
 He took it quietly, and cleared the bar at five feet ten in splendid 
 style, amid the deafening cheers of the 'Varsity. 
 
 He remembered ever after, that in that brief moment, when he 
 rose like a bird in the air, that he had only seen one face in that sea 
 of upturned faces that swam like faces in a moving glass before him. 
 
 What to him— flushed and heated with that first easy victory — 
 was the three-mile race ? 
 
 The hot, foolish blood of youth was throbbing wildly in his 
 veins, and the roar of the crowd was in his ears, and the face that 
 had led him on to victory was before him. 
 
 He had nothing whatever to do but to keep it in view. He saw 
 no other face as he swept round the course in the first round, 
 keeping well to the front all the way. It was the goal he made 
 for ; he knew exactly where to find it among a thousand others. 
 
 In his eagerness he had put on the pace too freely, and before 
 the second round was passed was already blown and panting. 
 There was only another man before him, who had taken the lead 
 from the first, and kept it, and the rest were well behind. 
 
 Herbert felt that he was turning gray, and for a moment he gave 
 it up, and determined to drop out of the race ; he even made a 
 nice calculation of the exact spot, but he would have to pass the 
 Trinity Lily first, and till then he told himself he would keep up 
 the pace. He would retire from the contest with honour, while 
 success was still possible ; but he could not fall out with that face 
 before him. The crowd would come between them presently — and 
 then ! 
 
 She was looking at him as he passed with a strange pity in her 
 eyes ; and her face he saw was as pale as his own, and her lips — 
 those speaking lips — were framing an unspoken message : 
 
 ' Wait a minute !' 
 
 He paused in obedience — but he did not fall out — and held back, 
 and recovered his breath, following easily till he was quite at ths 
 reai of the rest 
 
WAIT A MINUTE! 4? 
 
 The Trinity Lily smiled upon him encouragingly as he passed 
 again, and he — unconsciously — smiled back. 
 
 It was the last round, and it didn't seem worth while to fall out 
 now. And she was waving her handkerchief — he knew it was hers 
 ever so far off — and he took it for a signal that he might increase 
 his pace. 
 
 He did it slowly, by easy stages, so as to husband his breath for 
 the final spurt. He had not run steeplechases over the steep hills 
 of Devon for nothing. There were only alderbushes and squirrels 
 to look on there, and they were but indifferent spectators ; and 
 here there were bright eyes, and a white pocket-handkerchief 
 waving in the distance. 
 
 It was the handkerchief that did it. 
 
 Herbert made for that ; he put out the strength that he had 
 kept in reserve until that signal was waved, and he gained rapidly 
 as he turned the corner of the course upon the men who were a 
 long way ahead of him. 
 
 It seemed an impossible thing ; and the crowd were cheering the 
 man in front with a will. He did his best, and he did it splendidly, 
 but he had no reserves of strength to fall back upon in those few 
 closing yards where the race is lost or won. 
 
 Slowly Herbert gained on the panting few who had held out to 
 the end ; slowly, and almost sadly, for they deserved to win ! He 
 was conscious of being sorry for each man as he passed him ; but 
 that white handkerchief, waving in the distance, was impelling him 
 forward. 
 
 He had no choice but to run. 
 
 What were the crowd cheering for ? "What was that wild ac- 
 claim that filled the air with a name strange to university fame ? 
 
 'Flowers! Flowers!' the air was full of it ; and still he ran, 
 wondering, with that waving handkerchief in view. He saw 
 nothing else ; the sea of faces were all merged into one as he passed 
 the foremost athlete with a bound within a yard of the winning- 
 post, and won the three-mile race. 
 
 He was conscious only of being sorry for the other man, who had 
 run so well, and missed by a yard ! He was awfully sorry for him 
 when it was all over, and the splendid fellow had come in panting 
 and spent, with bloodshot eyes, and neck and face congested to a 
 livid purple, and passing the tape, with reeling brain and exhausted 
 strength, had rolled over like a log on the grass at his feet 
 
 They bore him off between two other men, while the crowd were 
 wildly cheering the winner ; and when Herbert had struggled into 
 a jersey, and was carried off in triumph by the Trinity men, he 
 was so sorry and conscience-stricken for having beaten him — when 
 he had deserved so well — that he could not meet the bright eyes 
 that were smiling upon him ; there was a very broadside of bright 
 eyes smiling upon him now, as he passed modestly through the 
 crowd to the pavilion. 
 
48 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A DARK NIGHT'S "WORK. 
 
 Success is often more dangerous than failure. It is certainly not 
 so good for us, which is a pleasing reflection to those who enjoy the 
 more wholesome but less agreeable discipline. 
 
 It was certainly not so good for Herbert Flowers. If he had 
 failed his college would have agreed that it served him right, and 
 left him in peace to read without interruption to the end of his 
 terms. 
 
 But success was quite a different thing. No man could win two 
 cups without being the hero of the hour among the athletes of his 
 college. The unknown sizar had his health drunk so many times 
 that night by the men of Trinity that it was no wonder his foolish 
 head was turned when he crept upstairs to his attic, in so be- 
 wildered a state that he forgot all about the familiar geography of 
 his ceiling, and ran his head up against the beams in a manner that 
 was quite unaccountable to him when he surveyed his mutilated 
 countenance in the glass on the following morning. 
 
 It was very well for Herbert that it was so near the end of the 
 term, and that those Latin hexameters he had been working upon 
 off and on ever since he came up had arrived so near completion, 
 for he had very little time for regular work now. He found 
 himself all at once the lion of the athletic set. It was all to no 
 purpose that he represented modestly to his friends that he was a 
 reading man, and that athletics as a branch of study were not in the 
 menu he had drawn out for his University course. 
 
 There were those two cups that brightened up his bare room like 
 a pair of bright eyes witnessing against him. If he could carry off 
 such trophies now, what could he do by-and-by, with systematic 
 training ? 
 
 The C.U.A.C. could not afford to let him slip through their 
 fingers, much more his own college. 
 
 It was quite a new sensation being made a lion of, after a 
 lengthened period of very wholesome neglect, and was, no doubt, 
 very soothing to his feelings ; and it would have been worthy of 
 Diogenes himself if he had sulkily shut himself up behind his oak 
 and refused to enter into more sociable relations with his fellow- 
 students. 
 
 Herbert didn't exactly give a ' wine,' but he gave a ' coffee ' after 
 Hall to celebrate his successes. 
 
 He had to borrow all the other men's china on his staircase, and 
 that brought him into more friendly relations with some of them, 
 whom he had hitherto only bowed to stiffly when he happened to 
 come across them on the stairs. Then the chairs were another 
 difficulty ; though the bedmaker had been persuaded to dust the 
 
A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 49 
 
 window-seat, still it wouldn't hold half the men who insisted upon 
 coming. 
 
 The only thing to be done was to borrow the other men's chairs 
 and let the men carry them up on their heads, which they did with 
 a will, as if it were an ordinary post-prandial exercise. 
 
 They crowded into Herbert's room until there was not sitting- 
 room for one more ; but the late-comers good-naturedly accom- 
 modated themselves to the situation, and squatted on the floor. 
 
 Herbert could not see the faces of his guests after the first 
 quarter of an hour, the place was so full of smoke. He poured out 
 the coffee in the borrowed teacups, and sent the sugar-basin round ; 
 but it unfortunately got lost in the beginning of the entertainment, 
 and the smoke was so dense that it couldn't be found again during 
 the evening. 
 
 However, nobody missed it, as there was a general demand for 
 beer ; and the gyp happening to come in at the right moment, and 
 to do honour to the occasion, as every man in the kitchen, from the 
 cook to the scullion, was justly proud of the glory reflected upon 
 Trinity by Herbert's successes, Audit ale was forthcoming. 
 
 It is not many entertainments that are graced by the presence of 
 Audit ale, that special tap that is reserved for the delectation of 
 Fellows on occasions when they happen to deserve well of their 
 college. The members of the C.U.A.C who were curled up on the 
 floor of Herbert's attic, knew well the strength of this generous 
 brew ; but their hospitable host imbibed it for the first time in his 
 University career with remarkable results. 
 
 The familiar beams of his ceiling were found at unusual eleva- 
 tions, and in quite unaccustomed places, whenever he made a 
 circular attempt to go across the room. He could go straight enough 
 at other times to reach the window at a right angle, but under the 
 influence of the Audit ale everything had acquired a habit of going 
 round, and the only way to arrive at a given point was by certain 
 rotary motions of the body, and these invariably brought inci- 
 dental prominences of feature into collision with the beams. 
 
 There was a great deal of athletic talk, and Herbert had a hazv 
 recollection of being entered for all sorts of events, and joining ;> 
 dozen clubs, and promising the cox of the Trinity boat to train for 
 the May races. In fact, he did not at all know what he had let 
 himself in for, and when the company dispersed and volunteered to 
 return the borrowed furniture to its various owners on their way, 
 Herbert presently found all his own belongings carried off en musse, 
 and when his matutinal bedmaker turned up a few hours later, the 
 debris on the stairs and the confusion of chairs on the landings 
 suggested to her intelligent mind the idea of 'fire,' and forthwith 
 she gave the alarm, and brought all the men on the staircase out in 
 a state of demi-toilet, and a crowd of college servants armed with 
 buckets of water, to find Herbert asleep on the floor of his keeping- 
 room in the midst of his shamed and outraged household gods. 
 
 4 
 
50 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The recording angel has a busy time at Cambridge ; let us hope 
 the sponge is used with a liberal hand ! 
 
 Herbert didn't appear at chapel that morning, nor for several 
 mornings, and he blushed quite guiltily when he met the clear eyes 
 of the Trinity Lily looking at him over the hymns with a grave 
 reproach in their calm depths. It was a strange influence, and he 
 couldn't at all account for it, that this pale-faced girl exercised over 
 him. After he had spent an evening at the Bellenden's he could 
 not write to the little mother for a whole week ; but the sight of 
 the Trinity Lily at her artless prayers always sent him back to the 
 rooms with a sudden desire to sit down and write one of his tender, 
 boyish letters, that would brighten the widow's lonely hours in 
 that poor home in the little white town of Bideford. 
 
 A very strange event happened at the end of the term, that had 
 the effect of deepening this influence in a very marked manner. 
 
 The post brought Herbert one morning, together with a letter in 
 that dear familiar hand, a little pink note in an unfamiliar but 
 charming caligraphy, with a faintly suggestive odour of some 
 subtle perfume. He turned the letter over and smelt it, and 
 examined the postmark, and finally opened it. Most men would 
 have opened it first, but Herbert had never received a dainty pink- 
 tinted note before. 
 
 It was only a few lines from the Misses Bellenden, requesting 
 the pleasure of his company at a small evening party the following 
 night. 
 
 The foolish boy left his breakfast untasted, and the Bideford 
 letter unopened, and burst in upon Geraint, who at that moment 
 was splashing about with terrific energy in his bath. 
 
 In response to Herbert's ' Hullo !' he came in presently arrayed 
 in a wonderful dressing-gown, looking like a tropical bird of 
 gorgeous plumage. The poor sizar surveyed him in speechless ad- 
 miration. He had. no dressing-gown himself, and shivered directly 
 from his bath into his clothes, without any luxurious intermediate 
 stage. 
 
 He exhibited his letter to Geraint with a pardonable exultation, 
 for among the pile of morning letters that were awaiting him un- 
 opened on his table there was no dainty pink, scented missive. 
 
 Geraint's handsome face flushed as he recognised the pretty, 
 irregular handwriting. 
 
 ' By Jove !' he said, taking it eagerly from Herbert, ' it's Hebe's 
 writing ! What the deuce does she mean by writing to you ? The 
 other always does the invitations.' 
 
 1 And you ?' said Herbert, glancing quite unintentionally on the 
 little heap of letters the other was turning over on the table. 
 
 ' Oh, they new^ «.ik me,' he said, with a low laugh, that was just 
 a trifle bitter for such frank lips. ' I've a standing invitation 
 Yes ; I shall go.' 
 
 He sighed involuntarily as he spoke, and his open brow clouded, 
 
A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 51 
 
 and a little spasm that was almost pain crossed his face for a 
 moment, for his eye had fallen upon another letter that lay un- 
 opened upon his table — a letter that had nothing dainty or sugges- 
 tive about it, written on the best of paper, in the best of ink, in a 
 large firm aristocratic female hand. 
 
 Geraint tossed Hebe Bellenden's pink note impatiently across the 
 table to Herbert, as if it hurt him somehow to see it lie — even for 
 a moment — in justaposition with this. Herbert remembered the 
 incident long after, when the bold, significant characters of that 
 aristocratic hand were strangely familiar to him. 
 
 'You will go, Flowers, I suppose ? You haven't been there since 
 that first night, when a shooting-star fell in our path under Magda- 
 lene Bridge. Do you remember it ? Was it prophetic ?' 
 
 He was turning over that letter beside his plate in an absent, 
 preoccupied way ; but he made no attempt to open it. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert with a laugh, ' I remember it very well ; it 
 was prophetic ; it was an omen to me that I should be ' gated.' I 
 6hall certainly go. It's so near the end of term now that I can't be 
 " gated " for more than a week.' 
 
 When the night arrived, Herbert dazzled the eyes of Brown — 
 who had come into his room for a smoke after Hall — by the vision 
 of his new shiny dress-suit, his cambric shirt-front, and his gold 
 stud, all of which articles were perfectly new — and unpaid for. 
 
 He had grown reckless lately, since he had received that invita- 
 tion from the Bellendens. In adding a dress-suit to his wardrobe 
 he had made other indispensable and costly additions to it, the last 
 item being a gold stud. 
 
 That evening, when Herbert came into the Chesterton drawing- 
 room, both the sisters Bellenden rose to receive him. They were 
 so delighted to see him, and greeted him so kindly, that the modest 
 undergraduate blushed, and did not remember for the rest of the 
 evening that that wretched dress-suit wasn't paid for. 
 
 'We saw you take that dreadful jump, Mr. Flowers,' said Hebe 
 Bellenden, in her low, rich voice, that Herbert thought was the 
 sweetest music he had ever heard. ' I knew you were going to win ; 
 I bet a dozen pairs of gloves on you.' 
 
 ' And won them, I hope ?' said Herbert gallantly. 
 
 ' And won them ! I should never have forgiven you if I had lost.' 
 And she flashed upon him a smile out of her dangerous dark eyes. 
 
 ' Are you so unforgiving ?' he said, for want of something bette: 
 to say. 
 
 ' You had better not try me,' she murmured, with a little shrug 
 of her lovely shoulders. ' I never forgive and I never forget. I 
 have never forgotten that I won your sovereign, and that you were 
 " gated " for a whole term on my account. You must have your 
 revenge by-and-by.' 
 
 And after this she introduced him to a Girton girl in a bewitching 
 Liberty frock, who had also been a spectator of the C.U.A.C. Sports, 
 
 4—2 " 
 
52 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 and who relaxed the severity of her normal attitude towards under- 
 graduates, and condescended to ask him how long he had been 
 training. 
 
 He answered so modestly that the superior creature told him, 
 quite confidentially, that they did a little jumping at Girton ; that 
 she herself had tried the high jump, but had never been able to 
 clear anything over four feet six. 
 
 'Your petticoats get in the way, I suppose,' said Herbert 
 modestly, and blushed dreadfully at the sound of his voice — 
 for the song, which somebody was singing, came suddenly to an end t 
 and caused his words to be heard distinctly all over the room. 
 
 The lady gave him a scornful look that ought to have annihilated 
 him. 
 
 • We don't wear petticoats,' she said coldly. 
 
 • Oh !' said Herbert, blushing deeper than ever. 
 
 'I mean, of course,' explained the sweet girl-graduate, 'that we 
 wear a proper dress for athletics ; we shall wear it, doubtless, alto- 
 gether by-and-by, when people understand these things better. It 
 would be quite impossible to play football in skirts !' 
 
 ' Quite !' Herbert gasped feebly. He was conjuring up an 
 awful vision of the Trinity Lily playing football in a divided skirt, 
 and the profanity of the idea made him blush dreadfully. 
 
 It was quite a relief to him when Miss Bellenden came and 
 carried off the Amazon to the piano. She sang a French song, a 
 very sparkling, brilliant affair, which he didn't understand a bit, 
 and which nobody listened to and everybody praised. 
 
 Conversation of a sentimental sort was carried on quite audibly, 
 with delightful disregard to the singing ; and when the songs were 
 ended everyone was so charmed, and some people begged to have 
 ' just the last verse over again !' 
 
 The rooms were quite full, and were perfectly lighted. There 
 were wax-lights on the mantelpiece, and on quaint sconces all over 
 the rooms. They lighted up Hebe Bellenden's figure to perfection, 
 as she sat beneath them on a crimson velvet couch that only made 
 the white velvet of her dazzling complexion whiter by contrast. 
 She wore a creamy gown of some soft, clinging texture, that 
 showed her figure to perfection ; and on her white arms, and round 
 her white throat, gleamed some blood-red gems that might have 
 been rubies ; her hair hung loose, in rich waves of dead gold, over 
 her velvety shoulders ; and the prettiest foot in the world, in the 
 daintiest satin shoe that Pinet ever made, gleamed out beneath the 
 soft folds of her dress. They lighted, too, the crowd of foolish un- 
 dergraduates who hung round her — simple, innocent fellows whose 
 honest admiration was all too visible on their ingenuous, beardless 
 faces. How they listened when she sang, every sweet note thrilling 
 through their soft hearts ! How willing and eager they were to 
 burn themselves in the light of this brilliant, dangerous beauty ! 
 
 Herbert was as bad as any of them She was an unearthly being 
 
A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 53 
 
 in his innocent eyes, superior to all his other loves — to Muriel 
 Spurway, to Julie — to the Trinity Lily ? No, he declined to draw 
 any comparison here ; he separated her in his mind, as Geraint had 
 separated the two letters on his breakfast-table, from the pale-faced 
 girl who sat beneath the organ-loft at Trinity. 
 
 The Girton girls left quite early, and Herbert helped to shawl 
 them in the hall, and led the Amazon gravely to her carriage. She 
 tapped him on the arm with her fan, as he was taking leave of her 
 at tbe door. 
 
 ' Don't lose your heart to Hebe Bellenden,' she said archly ; ' nor 
 your money,' she added in a lower voice, as the carriage drove away, 
 and the simple fellow went blushing guiltily up the steps. 
 
 The warning came too late. If the foolish undergraduate did not 
 exactly wear his heart pinned to the sleeve of his new dress-coat, 
 he had it conveniently at hand, ready for exchange at any moment. 
 Fortunately for him, Hebe Bellenden had more pressing business on 
 hand, and too many hearts already at her feet — hearts and purses. 
 
 Grinley had come in late, when the girl-graduates drove away, 
 and he and Miss Bellenden were already busy arranging the little 
 tables for cards. 
 
 Herbert looked into the room as he passed the door, but he did 
 not go in. It was nearly empty, he saw, as most of the men had 
 gone into the coffee room beyond for refreshments ; but he saw 
 Geraint talking to Hebe at the further end of the room. Her face 
 was turned away from him, and he saw that Geraint's fresh-coloured 
 face was unusually pale, and that he was bending over the lovely, 
 drooping golden head with a tenderness that was unmistakable. 
 
 Herbert saw that he was de trop, and followed the other guests 
 into the coffee-room. There was a continual popping of champagne 
 corks, and some of the men were drinking freely. He noticed one 
 man in particular, who had been hanging round Hebe Bellenden all 
 the evening ; a low-browed, swarthy fellow, with a heavy sulky 
 manner, who had followed her about with a sort of dogged perse- 
 verance, bending over her at the piano to turn the pages of her music, 
 and leading her back to her seat in a kind of sulky triumph. He 
 was drinking deeply now, glass after glass of bubbling champagne, 
 till his little beady black eyes gleamed with a strange fire, and there 
 was a dusky flush creeping up beneath his sallow skin. 
 
 When the men came back to the drawing-room, where the ladies 
 were, he seated himself at a little table opposite Hebe Bellenden. 
 Herbert fancied, as he watched her with his foolish jealous eyes, 
 that she turned slightly pale beneath that pretty permanent colour 
 on her cheeks, but her lips were smiling upon him. Geraint was 
 beside her still, and Herbert would have taken the only vacant 
 cha'r at the table, but she stopped him with a look that flashed out 
 upon him like a warning. 
 
 ' Not now, Mr. Flowers,' she said gaily ; ' not now. You shall 
 have your revenge presently.' 
 
54 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Fortune at first was all on the side of Hebe's black-browed 
 admirer. He won repeatedly, and Hebe lost with that charming, 
 indolent indifference which placed her high above most women, 
 who cannot lose money without losing their tempers. 
 
 In his sulky triumph the swarthy undergraduate became down- 
 right intolerable. 
 
 ' I am iri luck to-night/ he remarked with a chuckle, his little 
 red eyes leering across the table at Hebe. 
 
 ' You are in great luck !' she answered, with a little low laugh 
 that somehow made Herbert, who was looking on, feel uncomfort- 
 able, as if cold water were running down his spine. ' Your star is 
 in the ascendant.' 
 
 ' Is it so ?' he said. There was more in his voice — his thick, 
 unsteady voice — than in his words. 
 
 The girl took his meaning, for a warm, rosy flush stole over her 
 white bosom, and her full throat, and her lovely face, and her hand 
 trembled as she threw out the next card — and lost. 
 
 ' Oh !' said a man at the table, ' this is too bad ; you have been 
 losing all tbe evening, Miss Bellenden.' 
 
 ' Never mind,' said the fellow with a scowl ; ' that's her business, 
 not yours. We'll double the stakes.' 
 
 He threw again and won. He was quite wild with elation ; but 
 the girl's face was scornfully indifferent. The stakes were again 
 doubled : her hand did not tremble now, and she played with the 
 same languid indifference — and lost. 
 
 The fellow laughed a hideous little chuckle that showed all his 
 discoloured, uneven teeth, and pocketing his winnings, lounged 
 into the adjoining room to get some more champagne. 
 
 While he was gone the other men crowded round Hebe with their 
 honest regrets and expostulations, and begged her to play no more ; 
 and her sister, who was quite the other end of the room, flashed a 
 rapid glance at her across the tables. 
 
 ' The fellow's got the devil's luck,' Geraint said bitterly. 
 ' You've lost quite enough, Hebe ; don't play any more.' 
 Hebe's dark eyes shot out a gleam of scornful humour. 
 ' We shall see if he has had enough,' she said, smiling. 
 He came back flushed and heated with wine, and took his seat at 
 the table. 
 
 ' We'll double the stakes again,' he said thickly, and laid a roll of 
 notes on the table. 
 
 Hebe looked o^er to her sister, but Geraint laid a thick bundle 
 of delightfully new crisp notes on the table by her side. She 
 smiled and nodded her thanks, and took them quietly up, selecting 
 several out of the heap, which she staked with perfect coolness and 
 indifference. 
 
 The man looked across the table at Geraint, and Herbert saw a 
 scowl gathering over his heavy brow. His cheeks had an angry 
 flush, and his hands trembled as he threw out the cards. 
 
A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 55 
 
 The lack had turned against him, and he lost. He played again, 
 recklessly, doubling the stakes, and again he lost, and a murmur 
 went round the table. 
 
 ' I think you have lost enough for one night,' said a man behind 
 him, laying a heavy hand on his shoulder. 
 
 It was Grinley who spoke ; he had left his own table, and had 
 come over to see what was going on here. He was looking at Hebe 
 as he spoke, and not at the man, and Herbert intercepted a mean- 
 ing glance that passed between them. 
 
 'I wouldn't play any more to-night if I were you,' he said, good- 
 naturedly. 
 
 The man by this time was too excited to take advice. 
 
 1 If Miss Hebe is not tired, I'm not,' he answered doggedly. 
 
 Hebe laughed her low velvety laugh, that made Herbert feel 
 so uncomfortable in the region of his spine, and took up the cards. 
 
 ' Just for this once,' he said, and doubled the stakes again. 
 There was qiiite a little crowd round the table, and Grinley was 
 still behind his chair. 
 
 He played with strange, fierce eagerness, looking up once only 
 with a swift, hungry suspicion in his beady black eyes, and saw — 
 Well, whatever he saw, it was too late ! he had lost. 
 
 He rose up from the table muttering an oath, and Hebe rose up 
 at the same moment. 
 
 A change had come suddenly over her calm, indifferent face. 
 It had grown in a moment quite white beneath the two hectic 
 spots on her cheeks, and her scarlet lips parted with a curious 
 expression of suddenness and flutter as she made her way hurriedly 
 out of the room. 
 
 Her dress brushed by Herbert, leaving behind it the fragrance 
 of the most delightful scent in the world. 
 
 The little man was blustering at the table, and Grinley had his 
 hand on his shoulder. His face was livid and wet with perspiration, 
 but his small black eyes had a glare in them that was almost 
 demoniacal. 
 
 ' I tell you she did !' he was saying thickly, and even as he spoke 
 he had to steady himself by the chair. ' I shwear it !' 
 
 Geraint took off the attention from the ill-mannered fellow, who 
 had not mastery sufficient over himself to lose gracefully, by taking 
 Hebe Bellenden's place and calling upon Herbert to take the 
 vacant chair. 
 
 Herbert heard the man muttering to himself as Grinley got him 
 quietly out of the room : but he noticed that he shambled in his walk, 
 and stumbled against the chairs and the jambs of the door like a 
 drunken man. 
 
 The doer was closed upon him now, and the men continued their 
 game as if such little scenes were not unusual in La Maison 
 Bellenden. 
 
 Presently, looking up, Herbert noticed that Miss Bellenden's 
 
56 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 place was vacant, and the lights were burning low, and all the glot? 
 and brightness of the scene had departed. 
 
 He rose up to go, too, when the game was over, and went out 
 alone into the hall to find his cap and gown. 
 
 As he lifted the heavy hangings to make his formal adieux to his 
 hostess, Hebe Bellenden stood before him. 
 
 Her face was perfectly colourless, except for those awful rouge- 
 spots on her cheek, which only made her look more ghastly in the 
 lamplight. She put her finger to her lip with a sudden gesture of 
 caution, and drew Herbert silently into a little conservatory 
 beyond. 
 
 The place was damp and half lighted, and there was a suggestive 
 gmell of moist fresh earth. She closed the door upon them, and 
 stood looking at Herbert with a gravity and steadfastness, and yet 
 withal, with such an overpowering terror in her lovely eyes, that 
 an indefinable sensation crept shyly up in the region of his spine. 
 
 ' I am going to trust you, Mr. Flowers,' she said presently in a 
 low voice, that she tried in vain to steady. ' An awful thing has 
 happened,' and she shuddered and turned away her head. ' I want 
 you to help me ; but if you cannot, I want you to promise you 
 will not betray me !' 
 
 Her soft white hand was on his arm, and her warm breath on 
 his cheek, and the fragrance of the rose in her bosom overpowered 
 all his judgment and caution as she bent over him with those 
 tender pleading eyes. 
 
 1 Betray you ?' he said hotly ; ' of course I will not betray you !' 
 
 ' No,' she said sadly ; ' you would not except — except ' 
 
 * Except nothing !' he interrupted eagerly. 
 
 ' Will you swear it ?' she asked with a certain kindling in her 
 eyes, and in the dilation of the little sensitive nostril. 
 
 ' I will swear it I' he answered solemnly. 
 
 Her bosom heaved as if with a sudden relief, and the corners of 
 her tightly drawn mouth trembled. 
 
 ' Wait here a minute,' she said, and left him standing in the 
 moist, dusky place with that awfully suggestive smell of damp 
 earth, like an open grave about him. 
 
 She was not gone a minute, and she came back with a book in 
 her hand, a purple-covered, daintily bound little book, that bore no 
 evidence of frequent use. 
 
 ' Swear on that !' she said, 
 
 ' I swear that I will never betray you !' said Herbert solemnly, 
 and he kissed the book. 
 
 'Now,' she said, and her manner changed completely into one of 
 command, ' come this way ; speak softly, and do not be surprised 
 at anything.' 
 
 She led him out of the conservatory into a room on the same 
 floor, on the other side of the hall, and closed the door upon him 
 when he entered. 
 
A DARK NIGHTS WORK. 57 
 
 There were two people already in the room standing by the table, 
 upon which was a shaded lamp — the elder Miss Bellenden and 
 Grinley. They both turned quickly round when Herbert entered, 
 and Grinley came forward. 
 
 ' Do you know what you are doing, Hebe ?' he exclaimed 
 roughly. 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered coldly, almost haughtily, Herbert thought ; 
 'I have brought in a friend' — emphasizing the word and speaking 
 slowly — ' that you can trust — who will do all that you need.' 
 
 ' Have you told him ?' asked the elder Miss Bellenden signifi- 
 cantly, not lookiug at Herbert, but at her sister, with an unspoken 
 question in her fine eyes. 
 
 ' I have told him nothing !' said the girl, wearily sinking into a 
 chair, and putting her hand up with a sudden involuntary move- 
 ment before her eyes, as if to shut out some dreadful sight. ' You 
 must explain what you think necessary. I will answer for him.' 
 
 The elder Miss Bellenden was about to speak ; she began 
 nervously, wringing her white, shapely hands : 
 
 'A very unhappy thing has happened,' she murmured, but 
 Grinley interrupted her. 
 
 ' The fact is, Flowers,' he said, taking Herbert a little aside from 
 the ladies, and speaking in a low, confidential voice, ' a deuced 
 awkward thing has happened, unfortunately for the ladies, here in 
 this house. A man suffering from heart disease comes here, takes 
 advantage of Miss Bellenden's hospitality, and drinks more cham- 
 pagne than is good for him ; insists, as you saw, upon playing for 
 high stakes, grows reckless and loses heavily ; works himself up 
 into a state of excitement, dangerous to anyone with a weak heart 
 — you saw him stumbling about in the room — has an attack of 
 faintness, sudden collapse follows, and he dies right off !' 
 
 Grinley's eyes were watching Herbert with a furtive, anxious 
 expression as he spoke, though his tone was calm and collected. 
 
 1 And he,' said Herbert with a gasp, ' is — is he dead ?' 
 
 'Yes, dead 1 Nothing could be done for him ; he was gone in a 
 moment. The worst of it is its happening here. It would be so 
 awkward for the ladies if it were to get about.' 
 
 'Very awkward !' Herbert feebly assented, though his mind was 
 busy picturing those awful last moments of the poor wretch who 
 had so lately been playing by his side. 
 
 'We must think of the ladies, Flowers,' continued Grinley, 
 glancing over to where Hebe sat, with her hand still upraised be- 
 fore her stricken face. ' You must help me to protect them against 
 the scandal that this affair, if it becomes known, would create.' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert mechanically, ' we must think of the ladies ;' 
 and his mind was still groping its way after the man who had 
 stumbled against the doorway, and passed out of the brilliantly 
 lighted room into darkness — and death. 
 
 ' The first thing to be done is to get rid of the body,' Grinley 
 
58 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 continued, still eyeing Herbert with that furtive, questioning look, 
 ' It will be very simple. We have only to take him back to his 
 college as — as if he were drunk and incapable, as many fellows are 
 about the end of term, just before they go down. We can take 
 him in between us and carry him up to his room, and — and leave 
 him there.' 
 
 Herbert looked up for the first time with intelligent eyes. 
 
 1 To a want me,' he said, speaking slowly, and with a tremor in his 
 voice that he could not control, ' to help you remove the body ?' 
 
 ' Exactly ! We can take it between us in a cab, and nobody need 
 be any the wiser. It is impossible for it to remain here ; if there 
 are any questions to be asked they must be asked there,' and he 
 pointed in the direction of Cambridge. ' Consider the ladies !' 
 
 ' Yes,' Herbert said slowly — he could not collect himself suffi- 
 ciently to think clearly ; ' but how about those ?' 
 
 A sound of laughter and voices came from the coffee-room 
 beyond, and seemed to recall the presence of their guests to the 
 minds of the sisters. 
 
 ' You must go, Hebe,' said the elder Miss Bellenden ; ' you must 
 
 keep them amused till — till ' and she glanced fearfully across 
 
 the room to a couch which the lamp effectually shaded. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden rose to go, but her limbs trembled under her, 
 and she caught at the table for support. Grinley poured her out 
 some champagne in a glass that was on the table, but she put it 
 aside with a shudder. 
 
 ' No, no, not that !' she said, and she looked appealingly at 
 Herbert. 
 
 There was a decanter with brandy on the table, and some glasses 
 and a jug of water, and it was spilled all over the shining mahogany 
 as if it had been poured out hurriedly. 
 
 He took up out of the rack in the open liqueur-case a clean 
 glass, which he showed her, as her eyes silently followed him, and 
 poured some brandy in it, filling it up with water, and came over to 
 the stricken girl, holding it kindly, almost tenderly, to her trembling 
 lips. The glass rattled against her teeth ; but she drained all the 
 contents with an effort, and the colour came back slowly into her 
 cheeks. 
 
 ' You must go at once, Hebe,' said Miss Bellenden in a hurried 
 whisper. ' You must sing, child, do you hear ? You must make a 
 noise and keep them amused while — while ' 
 
 ' I know,' interrupted Hebe impatiently. ' Good-bye, Mr. 
 Flowers ; I shall never forget what you have done for me to- 
 night !' 
 
 She wrung Herbert's passive hand as she passed shudderingly out 
 of the room, with her lovely head averted from that darkened 
 corner. 
 
 Herbert never forgot her attitude as she passed him in her 
 white trailing robes, like some Lady Macbeth, with the red gems 
 
A DARK NIGHT'S WORK. 59 
 
 on her throat and arms gleaming in the lamplight like drops of 
 blood. 
 
 Miss Bellenden followed her, and returned presently with au 
 undergraduate gown and cap in her hand. 
 
 ' There is no time to lose,' she whispered hurriedly • ' they will 
 all be going presently, and there is nothing but a hansom to be 
 had.' 
 
 With her own white hands she helped G-rinley put the gown on 
 that dark object that lay all of a heap on the couch, and drew the 
 cap down over the pallid face. When this was done she beckoned 
 Herbert over, and between them they bore the lifeless body of the 
 undergraduate into the hall. 
 
 When they reached the outer hall, he and Grinley supported it 
 alone, while she closed the inner door before opening the front 
 door. He ever remembered in that awful moment, as he supported 
 the heavy, ghastly burden, the sweet tender strains of ' II Bacio ' 
 that floated out with him and it into the wild March night. 
 
 They bore it through the silent streets of Cambridge, this ghastly, 
 horrible burden, between them, supporting it on either side, in 
 a silence broken save by the moaning and shrieking of the wild 
 March wind. 
 
 At the gateway of St. John's the hansom stopped, and Grinley 
 got out and had a whispered consultation with the porter. The 
 man laughed and pocketed his fee, and threw open the gate, while 
 Herbert and he carried their helpless burden through. 
 
 They bore it across the silent quad, and up the narrow twisting 
 staircase to his rooms, where a lamp was burning and a cheerful fire 
 was awaiting him. They laid him on his bed in his academicals, 
 with his white, drawn face turned up to the sky — for the lattice of 
 his chamber was open — and the March wind was stirring his lank 
 damp hair in a cruel mockery of life — and death. 
 
 Grinley walked with Herbert to the gate of Trinity, for the poor 
 fellow stumbled and wandered like a drunken man. Grinley left 
 him at the gate, and he stumbled across the quad like one in a 
 dream. A voice was ringing in his ears — that was praying for him 
 ever so many miles away — but the words were quite audible, and 
 he repeated them mechanically, as he used to repeat them when he 
 was an innocent child at her knee, ' Lead us not into temptation, 
 but deliver us from evil !' 
 
 He had fallen fainting, overwrought with excitement and the un- 
 wonted faiigue of that heavy, ghastly burden, at the foot of his 
 staircase, with the innocent prayer of his childhood on his lips. 
 
 Geraint found him there hours after, when he came gaily up the 
 Btaircase trilling 'II Bacio, 11 Bacio!' in his manly tenor voice, 
 waking up all the echoes of the silent quad. 
 
€o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MRS. DO-AS-YOTJ-WOULD-BE-DONE-BY. 
 
 Herbert did not go down for the Easter vacation. He stayed up, 
 not so much for a commendable desire to read, as from a reluctance 
 to go back to his native town. 
 
 He fully persuaded himself that he wanted to work ; he quite 
 cheated himself, indeed, into that belief. It was not necessary to 
 invent any other reason with that all-sufficient one ready at hand. 
 It was not necessary to remind himself of that truth, that affords 
 consolation to every great mind whose worth one's neighbours are 
 slow to acknowledge, that a prophet hath no honour in his own 
 country. 
 
 Herbert was not exactly a prophet yet, and the little world of 
 Bideford had hitherto shown itself quite indifferent to his merits. 
 The time had not come for walking up to the front door of the 
 great house, and, all things considered, it was quite as well that he 
 should stay up and read during the short vocation. 
 
 If the truth must be told, he did not care to meet the little 
 mother so soon after that ghastly episode at Chesterton. He 
 could not look in those clear eyes, into whose pure depth3 he had 
 looked with perfect candour and confidence since his own had 
 opened on the light of this world, and had always seen heaven there ! 
 
 No, he could not meet those pure eyes with that guilty secret 
 pressing heavily on his conscience. Mother was still the name for 
 God and heaven to this simple, tender-hearted undergraduate. He 
 never knelt before that great White Throne, he never approached 
 that vast Presence Chamber, but he felt that she was with him, 
 that the sweet influence of his childhood was around him. The 
 secrets of his inmost heart were laid as bare before the only 
 heaven he knew as before that distant heaven he hoped for. 
 
 The ugly little affair at St. John's had created less stir in Cam- 
 bridge than would have been expected. The college authorities 
 were very much shocked at the discovery ; but as a medical man in 
 high repute, who had been consulted on various occasions by the 
 unfortunate undergraduate, testified to organic disease of the heart 
 of long standing, and was of the opinion that a fatal issue might 
 have occurred at any moment under the pressure of exciting causes 
 — and there were evidences of the presence of a sufficient quantity 
 of alcohol in the system to account for any amount of excitement 
 —there was no necessity for an inquest, and the matter was hushed 
 up. 
 
 The University abhors a fuss, and the college authorities dislike 
 publicity above all things ; and there were no awkward questions 
 asked beyond those which Mr. Grinley, who stood well with the 
 
MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE.DONE-BY. 61 
 
 Dean and was on very friendly terms with the Proctors, answered 
 in his accustomed candid and straightforward manner. 
 
 But the memory of that dark night's work was seldom out of 
 Herbert's mind during those first dreary days of the short vacation. 
 Nearly all the men of his college had gone down, Geraint and 
 Grinley among the first, and the place was dreadfully dull and 
 deserted. 
 
 Grinley avoided him, he thought, after that night, though they 
 met occasionally, and they spent the last evening of the term 
 together in Geraint's rooms ; but that awful subject was never once 
 named between them. 
 
 There was a photograph of Hebe Bellenden on Geraint's mantel- 
 piece — a charming photograph of the lovely face, with the dark y 
 dangerous eyes faintly smiling, and that subtle charm beneath the 
 purple-fringed lids that lured men on to ruin — and death. 
 
 There was an awful fascination for Herbert in the beautiful 
 face that smiled down upon him as he sat at Geraint's hospitable 
 hearth. 
 
 He used to steal in during the vacation and look at it, and once 
 he bore it off in triumph to his own room ; but he brought it back 
 again the next morning before daybreak. He couldn't enter that 
 audience chamber he was wont to seek before retiring to rest with 
 that face looking down upon him, and after a restless night, 
 haunted by evil dreams, he took the beautiful uncanny thing back, 
 and replaced it among Geraint's lares et penates. 
 
 A curious accident happened to Herbert during this short vaca- 
 tion that altered the pattern of his life, or as much of it as lay 
 in the shadow of the undreamed-of possibilities of the future. 
 
 A very small thing may do this : the twist of a thread, the sub- 
 stitution of a colour, may alter the tone and design and harmony of 
 the whole. But the pattern would not have been complete without 
 it. That wonderful complex pattern, woven in light and shade by 
 unseen hands that grasp and order the great design, depends for 
 its completeness on some trivial accident of Fate, that in our blind- 
 ness we — profanely — call Chance ! 
 
 Was it chance that took Herbert so often on the river during 
 those variable spring days — that ever-changeful season of swift- 
 showers and sudden sunshine ? 
 
 He was very glad to get away from his lonely rooms on that, 
 deserted staircase — for even Brown had gone down — to get away 
 into the sweet spring rain or sunshine, from the sight of that dead 
 face, from the memory of that ghastly burden that haunted him. 
 
 It was lonely enough, paddling through this flat, bare country , 
 it was very different to the broad, swelling Torridge, with the 
 green hills of Devon, fringed with fern to the water's edge, rising 
 steeply on either side, and the blue waves of the Atlantic breaking 
 in the distance over the bar. He used to dream of those as he 
 paddled between the level banks with the monotonous fields 
 
62 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 stretching flatly away until they met the horizon, and think of tho 
 little mother toiling day after day up to the great house to teach 
 those mutinous children. 
 
 The prospect was as dreary as the contemplation of those sad, 
 level fields, and, like them offered no break, no change, so far as the 
 eye could reach. What could he do to lighten the burden on those 
 tender shoulders? Other brave hearts, oppressed by a galling 
 sense of the unequal burden that some frail shoulders are bearing, 
 have asked the same question, and fumed and fretted, and made 
 high resolves. The nobler natures have kept them, maybe, and 
 returned in after-years a thousandfold the benefits bestowed by 
 those kind, willing hands ; and the weaker — are we not all weak ? 
 — have vowed, and wept, and thanked God for the tender love, for 
 the sacrifices that love alone can make — and by-and-by crept back, 
 like the Prodigal, to the ruined hearth, to find that even repentance 
 may come too late ! 
 
 Oh, the agony and the shame of that discovery ! 
 
 Herbert would groan aloud in these fits of contrition and remorse 
 — the memory of those accumulating bills was pressing heavily 
 upon him — and build up all sorts of castles in the air. They were 
 to be raised and paid for by work, and success — always by success 
 — and the little mother was to inhabit them. 
 
 If Hebe Bellenden were there, she was in an apartment far away 
 from that pure presence — in another castle, maybe, for he was very 
 fond of building castles in those sweet spring days, when the sap 
 was rising in every bough, and the lark was singing overhead. He 
 used to dream these hopeful dreams as he paddled about on the 
 sluggish Cam, as it wound through the ' Backs/ with the gray walls 
 of the colleges frowning down upon him, and the willows on the 
 banks whispering the secrets that had been confided to them by 
 undergraduates in terms long ago. The air was full of high hopes, 
 and ambitions, and emulations. A great storied past looked down 
 from the old lichen-covered walls ; a dim, shadowy future stretched 
 before him, broken by battlements and pinnacles that all pointed 
 the way to distinction and fame. 
 
 Perhaps it was these venerable walls, fringing the blue sky with 
 their turrets and battlements, that stimulated his castle-building — 
 there was so much material here. But the baseless fabrics had au 
 unhappy habit of collapsing, and tumbling down among tha 
 shadows in the dark waters beneath, and the present, with its lean- 
 ness and poverty, would mock his boyish dreams. 
 
 At such moments he would groan aloud, and, in that foolish, 
 impatient way of his, would send his canoe flying off down tho 
 stream with an impetus that would be likely to render it unpleasant 
 to any boat that happened to come in its way. He was disporting 
 himself one day in this reckless fashion, when a tub-dingey with 
 *ome ladies in it came round a corner. 
 
 He had calculated to shoot by quietly, but the tub, owing to the 
 
MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE-DONE-BY. 63 
 
 lady who was steering palling the wrong string, veered suddenly 
 round right across the river. The canoe had no alternative but to 
 go into it, and the tub reeled under the sbock, and with a sudden 
 flashing of oars the canoe turned upside down, and Herbert found 
 himself floundering in the river. 
 
 He went down under the tub, and whether in going down or 
 coming up, he got another bump — this time upon his head. 
 
 He was never quite sure how he did come up : it seemed to him 
 in that interval under water, when all sorts of long-forgotten things 
 came suddenly up before him, as if memory had turned the key of 
 all her secret closets, and the forgotten past came trooping out ; 
 it seemed, indeed, in that strange interval, that it was scarcely 
 worth while to come up again. 
 
 However, he thought better of it, and came up in a sad mess 
 and with a great deal of the slime and sediment of the Cam 
 sticking to him. 
 
 He had not the slightest recollection of how he got ashore, unless 
 somebody dragged him and hauled him up upon the bank. 
 
 There was somebody, certainly, a very long way off, saying in a 
 very distressed voice : 
 
 ' Oh dear, what shall we do ? He is one of our men, and we 
 have nearly killed him ! Oh, Fraulein, what shall we do ?' 
 
 The voice was very nice, and there was quite an agony of tears 
 in it. 
 
 ' I should leave him on ze bank until he feel bettare, and zen he 
 vill row backj and ze exercise vill do him much goot.' 
 
 It was a very unmusical voice this, with a strong German 
 accent. 
 
 1 Oh, Fraulein, how cruel !' The speaker was nearer now, 
 and somebody's warm breath was on his cheek. 'I'm sure if 
 you will help we can get him into the boat, and we will row him 
 back.' 
 
 ' You will do nozing of ze kind, mees. A nasty wet man in ze 
 boat ; faugh ! we shall all get von cold.' 
 
 Herbert thought it was about time to open his eyes, and he did 
 so, one at a time. The sight was not reassuring. 
 
 A hard-faced, stolid-looking German woman was poking him 
 with her umbrella. He discreetly closed them again, until a 
 dalightful voice, quite close to him now, cried : 
 
 ' See, Fraulein, he has opened his eyes ! he is coming to !' 
 
 Herbert came to with a bound, and, opening his eyes in the 
 direction of the voice, encountered a little frightened face quite 
 close to his. 
 
 The face drew back hurriedly, and Herbert essayed to rise upon 
 his elbow, while the sky and the river, and the flat-lying fields, 
 were performing all sorts of gyrations in their suddenly developed 
 propensity for shifting their relative positions. 
 
 • Oh, I am so glad you are better !' 
 
64 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The sky was on top now, and the fields were subsiding, and 
 Herbert thought he had seen the face before. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said, or tried to say ; ' I am better, thank you ;' but his 
 voice was so faint and far-off that he took it for somebody else's. 
 
 ' Oh, I am so glad ; I thought we had killed you !' 
 
 There were tears in the girl's eye?, Herbert could see, in spite of 
 the water in his own. 
 
 ' It was my fault,' he whispered in his faint, far-off voice ; ' I 
 fouled you.' 
 
 As he spoke there was the sound of a regular splash of oars on 
 the water, coming swiftly down the stream, and a four-oared boat 
 came in sight. 
 
 Somebody hailed them, and the men in the boat came ashore. 
 
 It was a very ignoble position for a member of the C.TJ.A.C, 
 stretched very awkwardly upon the river bank, and making a dread- 
 ful mess, and being poked at by a fat German woman with an 
 umbrella. 
 
 The harsh, guttural voice tried to explain matters ; but the girl 
 cut her short with her delightful, incoherent account of the acci- 
 dent. 
 
 ' It was all our fault ; we pulled the wrong string and got acrosB 
 the river, and the canoe ran against us and upset, and — and — I'm 
 afraid I knocked him on the head with the oar. It was all done in 
 a minute. I thought he would never come up again ! I don't know 
 
 how we got him ashore — and — and ,' here the speaker subsided 
 
 into a hysterical flood of tears, and the men hauled Herbert into 
 the tub and rowed him back to his college. 
 
 Herbert awoke next morning with the sound of the swift spring 
 shower pattering on the roof, and gurgling in the familiar lead 
 gutters beneath his window. The sound seemed very far away, 
 and the familiar gurglings and chokings in the water-spout were 
 more like soft, liquid inarticulate whisperings. He had not quite 
 awakened to consciousness, and with the sound of the pattering 
 rain came a strange sense of ripples breaking overhead, and the 
 waters closing softly over him. 
 
 He lost a-11 count of time as he lay thus, only hearing unmeaning 
 voices speaking to him from afar. It seemed quite ridiculous to 
 him lying there, leagues under water, with the ripples breaking 
 above him, to be asked by his bed-maker what he would take for 
 breakfast. 
 
 The blow on the head was a more serious affair than was at first 
 anticipated ; whether from the oar which the girl had used with 
 frantic haste to turn the course of the boat, or with coming in 
 collision with the tub, it did not much matter. It had been 
 sufficiently serious to cause a slight concussion, and Herbert took 
 several days to rally from the shock. 
 
 The Master of Trinity came over to see him several times as he 
 lay in this state, and sent his own doctor, and engaged a nurse 
 
MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE-DONE-BY. 65 
 
 from Addenbroke's to look after him. It had happened to be the 
 Master's niece and her German governess who were out in the 
 tub on that unlucky day, and the innocent cause of all this trouble 
 was breaking her tender heart, and reproaching herself for being 
 the poor sizar's murderer. 
 
 It was not quite so bad as that, as Herbert awoke to fuller con- 
 sciousness on the third day after the accident and beheld a beau- 
 tiful creature in a white apron, and a white cap, and a white collar, 
 and with grave face and serious eyes, watching him. 
 
 He didn't speak, for he was afraid she would vanish ; and as he 
 watched her, and tried to raise his head from the pillow, the 
 prodigal rain made a wilder noise outside, and there was a rushing 
 in his ears as if the unpleasant waters of the Cam were again 
 closing over him, and he fell back helplessly on the pillow. 
 
 The beautiful creature did not vanish ; she came over and stood 
 beside him, and laid a delightfully cool hand on his hot head, and 
 told him not to attempt to get up. 
 
 He framed some idiotic question which must have sounded utterly 
 ridiculous in sane ears ; but ( Water Babies ' had been running in 
 his mind so long, with a vague impression that he was one himself, 
 that he murmured with a fatuous smile of recognition : 
 'Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by ?' 
 
 It took him a long time to say it, as the syllables wouldn't fall 
 into their places. The lovely creature, who was ' neither gnarly, 
 nor horny, nor scaly, nor prickly, but smooth and soft, and pussy, 
 and cuddly, and as delicious a creature as ever nursed a baby/ 
 looked down at him with her kind eyes, and answered softly but 
 very irrelevantly : 
 
 ' Ton are much better, and I am the nurse.' 
 This was clearly a specious falsehood, and Tom, otherwise 
 Herbert, -who knew she was the other, looked back at her with 
 reproachful eyes. 
 
 It was quite ridiculous saying she was the nurse ; how could a 
 nurse live under water, with the wavelets rippling overhead, and 
 not a tuck in her apron or a frill on her cap was wet ? 
 
 He asked himself the question as he lay looking at her in the 
 spring sunshine, in that semi-conscious awakening that was less 
 slumber than a long dream of inarticulate whisperings. She wa» 
 still there when he opened his eyes again, when the sun had set and 
 the evening shadows were deepening in the room. 
 
 He was quite certain of her identity now, as she sat watching 
 him in the fading light ; and when the moon arose he saw that she 
 had ' two great armf uls of babies — nine hundred under one arm 
 and thirteen hundred under the other — and he wished she would 
 throw them all into the water, and take him in her arms and hush 
 him to sleep !' 
 
 He fell asleep whilst he was wishing it, and when he awoke sha 
 was sitting there still. 
 
 5 
 
66 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' Don't go away !' he said. His voice was not so far away now, 
 and the rain had stopped 
 
 ' No,' she said, smiling. ' I'm not going away.' 
 
 ' Not ever ?' 
 
 ' Oh yes, some day ; when you are better.' 
 
 4 When he was better ?' He asked himself what that could 
 mean, with a strange wonder. The answer did not come directly, 
 and when it did come all the scene of yesterday's disaster rushed 
 tumultuously into his mind. 
 
 The shame of it overpowered him. He remembered all at once 
 quite well how he— a member of the O.U.A.C. — had been upset by 
 a girl, and hauled ashore by an old woman with an umbrella ! 
 
 He groaned aloud. It would be the talk of the 'Varsity. 
 
 ' Who brought me back yesterday ?' he asked. 
 
 ' Yesterday ?' she repeated, laying a soothing hand on his head ; 
 1 why it happened a week ago !' 
 
 Herbert got round rapidly after this, and the beautiful creature 
 whom Herbert persisted in calling Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done- 
 by stayed with him until he was quite well again. 
 
 The master came over to see him several times, which was a 
 mark of attention. Long as he had presided over the college, he 
 had never been so high up that staircase before. He was very 
 wary about the beams, and inspected the condition of the gutters, 
 poking and prying about Herbert's keeping-room in a way that a 
 Master of a college is privileged to do. 
 
 He came across those Latin hexameters in the course of his 
 investigation, and read them with mild interest. He met with 
 the old coach's silver inkstand, too, and read the inscription with a 
 thoughtful, softening smile of recognition. It carried him back to 
 his own youth, to those bright early days of promise — splendidly 
 fulfilled — when the former owner had coached him for his Tripos. 
 
 He was a man of imposing presence, as a Master should be, with 
 a broad, nebulous forehead, and keen, searching gray eyes, that 
 flashed out beneath his bushy eyebrows to the extreme terror of 
 undergraduates; but he was not at all a terrible person as he sat 
 by Herbert's bedside, and talked to him of those early days when 
 the old coach was his tutor. 
 
 When a college Don unbends from that awful majesty which 
 strikes terror into the conscience-stricken undergraduate mind, 
 there is no man in the world more delightfully urbane and gracious. 
 A great mind never does things by halves. 
 
 Dr. Howell not only visited Herbert in his attic, but he invited 
 nim to visit Mrs. Howell at the Lodge, and receive his little niece's 
 regrets and apologies for the mischief she had unwittingly caused. 
 
 It was some weeks before he could get across the quad and 
 present himself in Mrs. Howell's drawing-room, but every day 
 brought gentle mementoes from the Lodge of the thoughtful 
 iindness of its gracious mistress — flowers from the Master's 
 
MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE-DONE-BY. 67 
 
 garden to brighten up his bare room, dainties from the Lodge 
 kitchen to tempt his appetite. 
 
 Herbert knew whose hands had picked those pale, sweet spring 
 flowers, so like herself, and quite trembled at the thought of that 
 meeting that awaited him. 
 
 Lucy had been informed by Mrs. Howell's own kind hand of her 
 boy's accident, and day by day she had received accounts from the 
 same source of his progress towards recovery. The Master himself 
 had written once to his old coach's daughter, and assured her 
 of Herbert's having all the care and attention that she herself could 
 give him. 
 
 There was quite a bundle of home letters for Herbert when he 
 was able to read them, all brimming over with that genuine tender 
 love which is the best, surely the best, though least valued, maybe, 
 of our temporary possessions here. 
 
 The tears were in the boy's eyes as he read these gentle effusions, 
 and when he had finished them he buried his face in the bedclothes, 
 and thanked God humbly for this tender love that was spared him. 
 
 How he would work and strive in the future to be worthy of it ! 
 And then, of course, came a good deal more castle-building. 
 
 Though every cloud-capt tower and gorgeous palace of our 
 youthful dreams should perish, and, like other baseless fabrics, 
 leave not a wrack behind to cheer us in our age, yet who would 
 not have been a castle-builder ? How real they were, how solid 
 and deep the foundations, how thick the walls, how lofty the 
 towers ! Well, if we are old and wise, we have done with castle- 
 building now ; other dreams have come and gone since then ; the 
 seasons have budded, and the harvest of our lives has been 
 reaped ; the smiling face of Hope has ceased to smile upon us, the 
 gladness of those early days has faded ; but still, in dreams, we see 
 them like some Palace Beautiful, with shining battlements and 
 cloud-capt towers. Maybe, upon another shore, defying time and 
 fate, we shall greet them — one of the glad surprises that await us 
 there these unfulfilled dreams of our youth. 
 
 When the dreamer was quite recovered of his accident, he went 
 tremblingly across the great court of Trinity to the Lodge by the 
 Master's invitation, to pay his respects to Mrs. Howell and her 
 niece. 
 
 Herbert's visit to a great house before had been by way of the 
 back stairs. He had often in these visits to Bratton Court, when 
 the doors happened to be open, caught fearful and awesome 
 glimpses of the magnificence of the reception rooms, and the 
 gloomy glory of the wide staircase — not the back one he crept 
 humbly up — with the family portraits of the Spurways looking 
 down from the walls, and suits of armour standing sentinel in the 
 corners ; but he had never before entered, by the front door, so 
 stately a house as the Lodge of Trinity. Yet the fine oak-panelled 
 ball and the noble staircase did not fill him with awe. There were 
 
 5—2 
 
63 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 uo Wardour-Street portraits on the walls, no bogies in armour in 
 the corners ; there was nothing to terrify him, or humiliate him, 01 
 make him feel uncomfortable. The air of the place was refined 
 and elevating, and, above all things, genuine and free from 
 pretence. The faces on the walls, as he climbed the wide oaken 
 stairs, looked kindly down upon him from their simple frames. 
 
 They were only engravings or etchings of notable scholars or 
 divines, and there was a tender freemasonry in the welcoming 
 glance which they gave the humble scholar across the years. 
 
 The same simplicity prevailed in the great drawing-room beyond, 
 that looks out on the old gateway of Trinity. Cut Herbert had no 
 eyes for the noble proportions of Mrs. Howell's drawing-room, or 
 for the stately, old-fashioned furniture that so well became it ; for 
 the blue Worcester vases on the high mantelpiece, or for the fine 
 portrait of the Master, which the Fellows of Trinity had just pre- 
 sented to Mrs. Howell, and which stood, in a rich carven frame, on 
 an easel in the middle of the room. 
 
 The blushing undergraduate had eyes for none of these — he had 
 seen the original of the picture before to-day — he only saw a droop- 
 ing figure and a fair face, that grew suddenly warm on his entrance, 
 and the kind, gracious figure of the Master's wife. 
 
 ' My niece has been waiting so long for an opportunity of ex- 
 pressing her regret at being the cause of your unlucky accident, 
 Mr. Flowers,' the lady began, introducing the shrinking girl by her 
 side to the modest scholar. 
 
 Herbert never heard the end of the sentence, for the lovely 
 culprit had given him a little warm hand, and was pouring out her 
 tremulous, incoherent regrets. 
 
 Her eyes were so bright that they seemed made for laughter, 
 and so liquid that they melted imperceptibly into tears. She was 
 smiling upon him one moment ; she was weeping the next. 
 
 • Oh, I am so glad ! — I am so sorry !' she sobbed in a delightful 
 inconsequent way that set the foolish undergraduate in a fluster. 
 
 Of course he hastened to assure her that ' it didn't at all matter, 
 and that he rather liked it than otherwise,' and other idiotic 
 remarks worthy of a scholar of Trinity. 
 
 The gracious mistress of the Lodge led the awkward, shame- 
 faced fellow on to talk of his mother, and on this subject he was 
 awkward and shame-faced no longer. He poured out into those 
 kind ears the story of Lucy's denials and sacrifices — the sweet, sad 
 story of her gentle life. He waxed quite eloquent on this tender 
 theme ; there never had been such love ; there never could be more 
 willing sacrifices. And the women listened to him with ready 
 sympathy. The pale cheeks of the white Trinity Lily grew warm, 
 and her gray eyes grew moist as Lucy's boy told unreservedly the 
 simple story of Lucy's trials, and of the brave spirit that had borne 
 her uncomplainingly through them all. There was no need of re- 
 servation here. There was no shame in poverty so nobly borne f 
 
MRS. DO-AS-YOU-WOULD-BE-DONE-BY. 69 
 
 and in the light of those clear eyes the poor sizar forgot all the 
 mortifications, the daily, hourly humiliations of his lot. 
 
 It happened, strangely enough, that the Master's wife knew Lady 
 Millicent Spurway quite well; they had been friends in youth, 
 schoolfellows, and more than once she had been a guest at the 
 great house by the Torridge. She knew and loved — as who docs 
 not ? — the little white town of Bideford, and knew every step of 
 the way up that steep path through the pines that Lucy had to 
 climb to her daily toil. 
 
 The pompous, kindly Master came in while Herbert was there ; 
 he left his awful majesty with his rustling silk gown, outside, and 
 only brought his genial kindliness into Mrs. Howell's drawing- 
 room. 
 
 He pointed out to Herbert, from the window, the rooms his old 
 tutor once occupied, and when he learned that the boy had brought 
 the old coach's musty old library with him to Trinity, he promised 
 to go over to Herbert's rooms and renew his acquaintance with 
 those old friends of his youth. 
 
 In this simple conversation the poor scholar's first hour at the 
 Lodge passed away. 
 
 ' How lovely she is, and how tender !' thought Herbert, as he 
 crossed the great court in the spring sunshine to his lonely rooms. 
 ' How the tears came into her eyes when I told her about the little 
 mother, and how well they became her ! Most women's eyes get 
 red and dreadful, but tears only make her lovelier than before !' 
 
 It was not the first pair of bright eyes that the impressionable 
 undergraduate had fallen down and worshipped ; it was not the 
 first divinity he had raved about. He was fond of creating 
 divinities ; he had arrived at that delicious period when every 
 goose was a swan, at least, and every lass a queen. 
 
 He had raved in turn about Muriel Spurway, and even that in- 
 corrigible little flirt Julie had kept him awake of nights, and Hebe 
 Bellenden had cost him countless heart-burnings ; but to none of 
 these had he ever confided that sweet, sad story of the little 
 mother. 
 
 The Master was as good as his word, and came over to Herbert's 
 attic to look through the old coach's books. 
 
 He took down one, and with a trembling hand turned the old 
 musty pages. It was scribbled all over with marginal notes, and 
 the leaves were yellow and discoloured by time ; but what a thiill 
 the sight of that well-remembered writing, of those familiar pages, 
 gave him after the lapse of half a century ! A mist came before 
 the eyes of the pompous old college Don, and for a moment he was 
 nineteen again. The past had risen up suddenly before him, and 
 the friends of his youth were once more around him — the passions, 
 the friendships, the dreams, and ambitions of those early days. 
 They all came back to him, stirred from their peaceful Hades by 
 the sight of that old familiar page. 
 
70 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The great scholar closed the book with a sigh, and the friends of 
 his youth melted away again into shadows. 
 
 Was he the same man ? he asked himself, as he crossed the great 
 tourt to the Lodge — he used to cross it once to some poor rooms 
 very high up — that thumbed that musty old book in the year? 
 that were past ? Where were the friends whose eager faces these 
 pages had recalled, the young voices, the brave, manly hearts that 
 beat so high in those old days ? Alas ! Fate had darkly inter- 
 posed : the young voices were silent or strange, and the hands 
 grasped across the years in the generous grasp of youthful friend- 
 ship were cold, and the familiar names were only a dim legend in 
 the courts thev once trod. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 WILD OATS. 
 
 • When within my veins the Mood ran, and the curls were on my brow, 
 I did, ye undergraduates, much as ye are doing now.' 
 
 Easter term brought several changes into Herbert's staircase. A 
 divinity student occupied the rooms beneath him, and a freshman, 
 who had come up with him in the October term and had lodgings 
 out of college, gladly availed himself of the vacant rooms on his 
 landing. 
 
 He made himself very much at home on the first evening by 
 borrowing all Herbert's crockery and his solitary tea-kettle, and 
 returning it with exceeding gravity, and the bottom burnt out, on 
 the following morning. 
 
 This being the usual way of making acquaintance at Cambridge, 
 Herbert could do no less than propose, being of the same staircase, 
 that they should know each other, and carried him off from the 
 chaos of his boxes and things to have breakfast in his room with 
 the assistance of Brown's tea-kettle, Brown seldom having any 
 need of it before noon. 
 
 Brown had come up early, armed with another likeness of Maria, 
 and fortified with the best of resolutions for keeping the term. 
 His Tripos came on in May, so that it was quite time that he began 
 to work in earnest. 
 
 By way of preparation, he got hopelessly drunk at a college wine 
 before the end of the first week, and was brought home at one 
 o'clock in the morning by his friends, and deposited outside his oak 
 — having lost the key — where he was found by the divinity student, 
 who took him in and put him into his own bed, and sat up shiver- 
 ing all through the night with him, until the bedmaker relieved 
 him in the morning. 
 
 This was unfortunately only the beginning of other excesses. 
 
WILD OATS. 71 
 
 Brown had got. mixed up with a fast set, and, being utterly weak 
 in purpose and in principle, was easily led away. 
 
 Herbert called upon him the morning after, as soon as his oak 
 was open, returning the borrowed kettle, which the bedmaker had 
 forgotten, and found him looking very white and miserable, and 
 with a wet towel round his head. 
 
 The table was littered with small sodas, and in a puddle was a 
 letter in the familiar handwriting of the Dean, and an open note 
 lay before him from his tutor, requesting the favour of an imme- 
 diate call. 
 
 Brown looked helplessly from these trophies of his night's dis- 
 sipation to Herbert, who looked very grave. 
 
 ' You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Brown !' he begau 
 severely, puckering his frank forehead into a frown. 
 
 Brown groaned aloud. 
 
 ' Don't hit a fellow when he's down,' he whined. 
 
 ' I don't know, old man, that a good whipping wouldn't be about 
 the best thing for you,' returned his Mentor severely. 'I think it's 
 a great pity they've banished the rod here. They whipped Milton 
 at Christ's, and made a poet of him ; and if they whipped you in 
 time there might be a chance of making a parson of you some 
 day.' 
 
 ' I'm afraid that's all over,' said Brown ruefully, pushing the 
 Dean's letter out of the puddle to Herbert. 
 
 He opened the wet epistle, the soda water falling off it in 
 great tears upon the floor as he read. It was very brief and to the 
 purpose. 
 
 'Dear Sir' (it began), 
 
 'Your attendance last term at chapel was not such as to 
 qualify you for testimonials for Holy Orders. 
 
 ' I am, yours sincerely, 
 
 ' H. C. Thorpe, Dean.' 
 
 ' I say, old man, this is serious,' said Herbert pulling a very 
 grave face. ' This is your last term, you know. You must turn 
 over a new leaf, Brown. Just think of the old governor — and 
 Maria !' 
 
 ' I've done nothing but think of 'em,' Brown groaned. His little 
 red eyes were very moist, and something was trickling down his 
 cheeks ; it might have been the water from the towel. ' I've been 
 thinking about 'em all night. It was thinking about 'em brought 
 me to this,' and he glanced helplessly at the half-emptied sodas. 
 1 1 couldn't stay here alone, after Hall, for thinking of 'em, and I 
 went over to Grinley's and had some nap, and this is what's come 
 of it 1' 
 
 ' Nap !' repeated his Mentor, quite angry now in earnest ; ' and 
 lost your money again ! How much did you lose last night, 
 Brown ? Now no evasion ; tell me the exact truth.' 
 
72 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 A spasm of real contrition passed over Brown's little, weak face, 
 and he groaned audibly. 
 
 ' Ton my honour, Flowers,' he whimpered, ' I haven't the least 
 idea.' 
 
 As they were talking, some men came in with their notebooks in 
 their hands. 
 
 ' What ! not at lecture, Brown ? I say, you'll never get your 
 certificate. Old Robinson's awfully particular, and you haven't put 
 in an appearance this term.' 
 
 ' I couldn't very well go like this,' said Brown sulkily, pointing 
 to the moist turban that encircled his brows. 
 
 The men laughed. They were strong, ruddy, muscular fellows ; 
 the artless roses ef their youth had not paled yet in the atmosphere 
 of stale tobacco and college wines. 
 
 ' You didn't take enough seltzer in your brandy, old man ; it 
 took four of us to get you home.' 
 
 ' Oh, I'm sure I'm obliged to you !' Brown mumbled ; and he held 
 his head down and tried to control a tremor in his voice. ' You 
 haven't an idea now, have you, how much I lost to Grinley at that 
 confounded nap ?' 
 
 ' How much ? Oh, I should think something stiff. I saw you 
 writing an I.O.U. You can trust Grinley, he won't forget !' And 
 with this delightful assurance the good-natured fellows went laugh- 
 ing down the stairs. 
 
 When Herbert looked into Brown's room after Hall — where the 
 invalid did not appear — he met him with a ghastly face. 
 
 1 Oh, Flowers !' he groaned ; 'it's all up ! I lost twenty pounds 
 to Grinley last night — it's all square, he has my paper for it— besides 
 my allowance for the term ; and — and I haven't a penny in the 
 world !' 
 
 The poor fellow burst into tears ; they were real enough now, 
 for the towel no longer encircled his brows. 
 
 ' How do you know ? Has Grinley been here ?' 
 ' Oh yes ; he's been here right enough,' said Brown bitterly. ' I 
 should think you could smell his confounded scent. He came here 
 before chapel, with his big diamond flashing, and his great shining 
 teeth flashing, and his cold, calculating eyes flashing like steel ; 
 and he sits there where you sit ' (Herbert unconsciously got up) ; 
 'and he pulls out a paper and reminds me of my little debt. My 
 little debt ! and I know no more about it, on my honour, Flowers, 
 than a babe unborn !' 
 
 Herbert ground his heel in his impetuous way into Brown's poor 
 hearthrug. A little scene rose up before his eyes at this moment, 
 and a livid face came between him and Brown. 
 
 Brown's was quite ghastly enough, and his poor weak, blue eyes 
 were red and swollen, and his lank hair hung over his miserable 
 little face. 
 
 ' Did — did you look at the paper ?' Herbert asked awkwardly. 
 
WILD OATS. 73 
 
 ' Oh yes ; it was right enough,' Brown said, with a dismal sigh ; 
 'it's quite square. He'll have to wait, though — everybody will 
 have to wait ; but what the poor old governor will say when it 
 comes to his ears, Heaven only knows !' 
 
 It was no use crying over spilt milk ; and Brown made so many 
 vows of amendment in the future, that his Mentor's severe attitude 
 relaxed towards him, and he carried the prodigal upstairs to his own 
 room, and gave him a cup of coffee, and allowed him a smoke, and 
 introduced him to his new neighbour, who had dropped in by the 
 way to borrow something. 
 
 Brown was so moved by the mild excitement of the coffee 
 that he poured out the story of his woes to his new acquaintance, 
 and told him, quite in confidence, that he was engaged to the 
 dearest girl in the world — in fact, he had her likeness downstairs ; 
 and if Cudworth, the ingenuous freshman, would go down with him, 
 he would, in the strictest confidence, show it to him. 
 
 He couldn't remember where he had put the latest edition of 
 Maria when he got back to his room, but he turned over the papers 
 on his table, and found the one that was lying there last term, face 
 downwards, and handed it with much pride and satisfaction to his 
 new acquaintance. 
 
 ' Oh P said the other by way of comment, opening his eyes to an 
 unusual width ; — ' oh !' and he laid the photograph down in its 
 usual recumbent position, with a certain instinctive recognition of 
 Brown's delicacy in displaying to the vulgar gaze the charms which 
 the lady's scanty drapery revealed. 
 
 Herbert heard him singing to himself when he settled down to 
 work for the night : 
 
 ' Oh, Kicklebury Brown 1 oh, Kicklebury Brown ! 
 "What a precious little fool you are !' 
 
 Brown went from bad to worse. In defiance of the Dean's severe 
 frown, and Maria's tender letters, and the hopeful, encouraging 
 epistles from the little country vicarage, which always brought, at 
 least, an honest flush of shame to his cherubic countenance and a 
 momentary spasm of contrition, he neglected his chapels, evaded 
 hi6 lectures, ignored his work, and fuddled away his days in smok- 
 ing, and drinking, and playing nap, or driving with Geraint or 
 Grinley over to Newmarket, and returning after the college gates 
 were closed. 
 
 Herbert remonstrated with him, but he didn't give him up. The 
 divinity student remonstrated, the Dean remonstrated, his tutor 
 remonstrated ; in fact, everybody remonstrated with the weak, 
 well-meaning, simple-minded fellow, who was liked as much as he 
 was laughed at by the whole college, which was saying a great deaL 
 Does that wild, thoughtless life bear telling altogether ? Candoui 
 must draw a veil somewhere ; let it draw a veil over Brown's 
 youthful follies. 
 
74 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 In spite of everybody's remonstrance Brown went from bad to 
 worse. He not only floundered into all the sloughs that men 
 usually have to get through in the course of their University 
 career, but he went out of his way to tumble into one or two that 
 lay quite out of the beaten track — for poor men. 
 
 He went to Newmarket with Grinley, and lost money there. 
 
 G-eraint lost, too ; he always lost, but he always paid with the 
 best grace in the world, signing his name to a carefully-written 
 cheque as steadily as if it were a subscription to a charity. Brown 
 had no money to pay, and his signature wasn't worth the paper it 
 was written on ; but he wrote his name nevertheless, at the foot of 
 all sorts of documents ; and his miserable little conscience, that 
 was powerless to keep him straight, stung him so dreadfully 
 whenever he was sober, and when he allowed himself to think, that 
 he grew more reckless than ever. 
 
 The duns began to gather in quite an appalling array outside his 
 oak. He kept it sported generally, and only admitted his friends 
 upon given signals. His tutor heard of it, and threatened to write 
 to his father ; but Brown promised amendment, and vowed he 
 would pay them all off within a week. 
 
 He would, no doubt, if he had the money, unless a pleasanter 
 way of spending it had occurred to him, but he hadn't a penny in 
 the world. 
 
 So he sat at home with his oak sported, a prey to the deepest 
 anguish and remorse ; he dared not go out by day, for a man of 
 sinister aspect had been lurking about his staircase for days, waiting 
 to pounce upon him directly the protecting oak was unlatched. 
 He caught him at last, in spite of his precautions, and Brown 
 came into Herbert's room with a very white face, and a nasty 
 yellow paper in his hand, which he was holding at arm's length, 
 as if it would sting him. 
 
 He threw it down before Herbert with a groan, and flung him- 
 self into a chair. 
 
 ' The gods are just,' he said with a tragic air, ' and of our 
 pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us ! Scourge number 
 one !' 
 
 ' By Jove, this is serious !' said Herbert, turning over the bilious 
 looking document. It bore a great seal in the corner, impressed 
 with the arms of the County Court holden at Cambridge, and some 
 cabalistic characters, on the margin of which the sum total of debt 
 and costs, as it kindly explained, amounted to £33 18s. 6d. ' What 
 will you do, Brown ?' he asked, when he had read the summons 
 carefully through. 
 
 ' Do ?' said the other moodily ; ' go to the Jews, I suppose — 
 which is only another name for going to the devil. Get old 
 Hundred-per-Cent. to lend me fifty, and pay it off, and some of the 
 others. I must pay some of the fellows, or they'll be coming 
 down upon the governor.' 
 
WILD OATS. 75 
 
 1 1 wouldn't go to the Jews if I were you, Brown,' said Herbert 
 reflectively ; ' I'd make a clean breast of it to the governor.' 
 
 ' It's no use,' said the other shaking his head gloomily. ' I 
 couldn't do it — I haven't the heart to do it.' 
 
 ' Nonsense,' said Herbert cheerfully ; ' he'd soon get over it. 
 There would be, of course, the usual mauvais "quart d'heure, and 
 then he'd come round and square up — and you'd promise it shouldn't 
 happen again, and so forth ; and then you'd shake hands, and it 
 would be all over.' 
 
 ' All over ! Oh, Flowers, you don't know half !' and Brown 
 groaned aloud. ' This is nothing to those other things — those 
 cursed I.O.U.'s. It would break the dear old boy's heart, if it 
 came to his ears. I've disappointed him enough already — and cost 
 him enough — Heaven knows ! He'd pay 'em if he could ; he's 
 never ref jsed me anything, and he's never reproached me. But 
 there are seven of us, and I the eldest, and he's only a poor country 
 parson, and has enough to do to make both ends meet already.' 
 
 1 Still, I would tell him, Brown. I'm sure it would be best ; he 
 would advise you what to do.' 
 
 ' I know exactly what he would do, 'said Brown gloomily ; ' he 
 would pinch himself, and wear a thin coat through the winter, and go 
 without a fire in the study, and cut off his glass of port at dinner, 
 and his daily paper, and sell the old gray pony and go through the 
 wet lanes on foot to visit his people, and serve that mission chapel 
 on the hill, three miles off, through the worst roads in the county. 
 Yes, he'd do all this, and never complain. God bless him, dear old 
 boy V 
 
 The tears were in Brown's eyes now, and running down his 
 white cheeks, and Herbert saw the printed letters on the nasty 
 yellow paper through a mist. He was thinking of the little 
 mother at Bideford, who was doing precisely the same things for 
 him in her way at that very moment. 
 
 ' No,' said Herbert huskily, ' I don't think it would do to tell him. 
 Why don't you take it to Routh, and ask him what you can do ?' 
 
 ' Routh ? Won't do, old fellow. I'm in bad odour enough in 
 that quarter already. No, I must raise the wind.' 
 
 And Brown, with a dismal attempt at cheerfulness, sallied forth 
 on that profitable pursuit. 
 
 Mr. Routh was a tutor of Trinity — the most amiable and urbane 
 of tutors — and he would certainly have given Brown the wisest and 
 kindest of advice in his perplexity, accompanied, doubtless, by a 
 suitable reproof. Not very severe, for Brown's debts were but 
 grains of sand to the magnificent debts of the other men of Trinity. 
 But instead of that the silly fellow proceeded to raise the wind in 
 the time-honoured way of ingenuous undergraduates, without a 
 thought of the whirlwind that he would reap by-and-by. 
 
76 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE BEDMAKER'S GHOST. 
 
 Herbert had changed his rooms early in the term, and gone down 
 a floor lower in the regular order, au troisieme the first year, a 
 second the second. But he had gone down a little earlier, and the 
 change was brought about in a ridiculous manner. 
 
 It was only another exemplification of the old adage that those 
 who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Herbert had 
 been engaged in that virtuous exercise a good deal lately. 
 
 Since his accident he had somewhat relaxed his reading, spend- 
 ing an hour in other men's rooms after Hall, discussing art, wine, 
 politics, the future of the college boat, instead of sporting his oak 
 and burning the virtuous midnight oil. 
 
 He had been spending the evening in Geraint's room with some 
 kindred spirits, not the boating set, who had given them up long 
 ago. G-eraint's shoulder was still too weak for him to be any good 
 in the May races, and Herbert only did a little solitary tubbing to 
 keep himself in practice. 
 
 ' Never mind, old man,' Geraint said in that delightful, sanguine 
 manner of his that took off all disappointments ; ' we'll go in for 
 the Lent by-and-by ; we'll show them what we can do !' 
 
 It was a very small wine, just a few men of the staircase ; the 
 divinity student had gone away early. He was a nervous, crotchety 
 fellow, who had a horror of smoke, and wore a little undignified bit 
 of blue ribbon in his button-hole. The men of his staircase would 
 no doubt have made fun of Jayne's modest decoration ; but he had 
 been so hardly treated by Nature that he was considerately spared 
 by his fellows. 
 
 The divinity student had a club-foot ; where other men leaped, 
 he limped painfully and slowly. He was cut off by his infirmity 
 from the healthy, active life of the University, from the boating 
 and the cricketing, the football and tennis, and all that made up 
 the enjoyment of other men. 
 
 By his own act he had still further cut himself off from the com- 
 panionship of the good fellows of his college, from wines, and 
 card-parties, and supper-parties, and hung out a little trumpery 
 blue flag, and shielded himself behind it whenever temptation 
 assailed. 
 
 Directly the cards were brought out Jayne rose to go. 
 ' Don't go, old fellow,' said Geraint, gathering the cards up ; 
 • here, we'll throw 'em into the fire and have some singing instead,' 
 and, suiting the action to the word, he flung the cards under the 
 grate — there was no fire in it. 
 
 ' Fact is,' said Jayne nervously, ' I've got a Bible-class in Barn- 
 well, and I'm a little late as it is ; it takes me a long time to walk 
 
THE BEDMAKER'S GHOST. 77 
 
 there ;' and he looked down at his lame foot and sighed. Then 
 remembering himself, he reddened fiercely. ' I don't suppose that 
 any of you would care to help ?' he said hesitatingly, as he limped 
 over to the door ; ' we want workers so much ; there's a great deal 
 to be done among the boys, and the work's begun ; but we want 
 help ;' and he glanced back over his shoulder at the men at the 
 table, and his eye seemed to rest upon Brown. 
 
 There was no response, and he shut the door behind him, and 
 they heard him limping painfully down the stairs. The men 
 laughed, and Geraint threw away his cigar, and looked at the strip 
 of blue evening sky that could be seen through his open window, 
 and softly repeated to himself : 'Barnwell !' 
 
 The wine flowed freer and the talk faster after Jayne was gone, 
 and the cards were picked up quite uninjured out of the grate, and 
 there was a little nap. Brown slipped away in the midst, and 
 Herbert would have followed him, but Geraint detained him while 
 Cudworth sat down at the piano and obliged the company with one 
 of his select and delightful comic songs. 
 
 Singing wasn't much in Herbert's way, and he tossed over rather 
 impatiently the things on Geraint's writing-table until the song 
 should be over. A subtle perfume warned him before his hand 
 touched the little pink note in the handwriting he knew so well. 
 He threw it down directly with a guilty blush, and a photograph 
 fell out on the table. He turned away and tried to resist the 
 temptation ; but his eyes wandered back to the photograph. The 
 lovely face was lovelier than ever as it glanced archly over her 
 velvet shoulder, and the beautiful dead-gold hair fell in a sweeping 
 mass below her waist. 
 
 Herbert saw none of these details ; he only saw the pleading look 
 in the dark, gazelle-like eyes, and her voice was again ringing in his 
 ears. 
 
 * You will not betray me !' 
 
 The whole dreadful scene rose up before him, and he staggered 
 to a table and poured out a brimming cup of wine. This was the 
 last thing that Herbert remembered of that wretched evening's 
 work. He was unused to wines, and the fumes of the Latakia 
 confused him, and he had a hazy recollection of going nap so many 
 times, until the last coin in that little netted purse rolled out upon 
 the table. 
 
 Then he stumbled up to bed ; but Nemesis had gone up before 
 him. He crept humbly to bed, too bewildered to remember a 
 certain old-fashioned custom he had learnt at his mother's knee be- 
 fore he laid his flushed face and uneasy conscience upon the pillow. 
 
 It had not lain there long before there came an ominous rap on 
 the door of the ghost's cupboard in his keeping-room. He had for- 
 gotten to close his chamber- door, so he heard it very distinctly. 
 
 ' It's that confounded nap,' said Herbert, resolutely turning his. 
 face to his uncomfortable p How. 
 
78 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 During the vacation, when all the other men were down, Herbert 
 and the ghost had the staircase all to themselves, and she had not 
 reminded him in any way of her existence. Indeed, during his 
 illness she had behaved with great delicacy and consideration, and 
 had not required any trifle in the way of a tong or a coal-scuttle to 
 be flung at the door where she habitually kept. 
 
 Rap, rap, came again more distinctly upon the midnight air. 
 
 1 What a fool I was to take that champagne !' he said un- 
 
 The knocking was repeated with renewed vigour, as if a boot had 
 been applied to emphasize it. 
 
 Then he suddenly remembered the story of the bedmaker's ghost, 
 and sat upright in bed, and listened. 
 
 His hair didn't exactly stand on end — it was an awkward length, 
 as he wore it long — but a particularly creepy, crawly sensation stole 
 shyly up his spine and affected his circulation. 
 
 He had not long to listen before the knockings were repeated 
 with renewed vigour, as if the ghost were growing impatient. 
 
 It was uncanny, to say the least of it, and in his bewildered state 
 he could not remember where he had put the matches, and there 
 was no moon, and everybody on the staircase was asleep with his 
 oak sported. 
 
 Herbert suddenly remembered he hadn't sported his, and some 
 vision of hasty flight passed through his brain ; but he rejected it 
 as unworthy of an undergraduate mind. 
 
 It was of no use his telling himself that it was the champagne, 
 or the Latakia, or the state of his nerves — the knockings were 
 repeated with so much vigour, as if a hundred bedmakers were shut 
 ap in that gloomy den, and a quite appalling volley of execrations, 
 as if each separate bedmaker were using unparliamentary language, 
 issued from behind that awful door. 
 
 Herbert, muddled and confused, but gathering himself up by an 
 effort, crossed the floor of his keeping-room, coming into collision 
 with a beam or two on the way, and opened the door of the troubled 
 closet beyond. 
 
 It was quite dark, but as he opened the door — suddenly and 
 noiselessly— a heavy body rolled over at his feet. 
 
 Herbert Flowers was not quite so well the following morning, 
 and when the doctor who had attended him in his illness made 
 inquiries as to the exciting causes of this relapse, the little story of 
 the college wine, and the nap — no, this little story did not come 
 out — and the bedmaker's gnost came out. 
 
 This last was easily explained. 
 
 The new tenant, Cud worth, who 'kept' on the opposite side of 
 the staircase, groping his way up after midnight from the wine 
 below, had quite naturally mistaken his room. Sufficient intelli- 
 gence remaining to enable him to remember that his sleeping apart- 
 ment was on the right, he had opened the door of Herbert's gyp's 
 
THE BEDMAKERS GHOST. 79 
 
 den, and shut himself in, and when he found out his mistake "was 
 unable to find the handle of the door and get out again. 
 
 The doctor looked grave — graver than these foolish stories 
 seemed to demand — and recommended Herbert to do two things ■ 
 abstain from college wines, and change his rooms. 
 
 A dozen men generously came forward and offered to change 
 rooms with him. 
 
 He was so ridiculously shaken in his nerves that he gladly 
 accepted the offer of the divinity student, Jayne, who kept below 
 him. 
 
 His poor furniture looked bare and insufficient in his new rooms ; 
 but every man on the staircase found out, quite suddenly, that he had 
 more chairs, and tables, and rugs, and pictures than he could find a 
 place for, and begged Herbert, as a personal favour, to give them 
 room. 
 
 He saw through the kindly subterfuge, and accepted their offers 
 in the same generous spirit in which they were made. Nor did 
 their kindness end here. For a whole week it was the quietest 
 staircase in the quad, and the man beneath him put off a wine on 
 his account. 
 
 He was a third-year man, and was supposed to be reading for 
 his Tripos, so perhaps, as the time was short, it was quite as well 
 he did put it off. 
 
 He didn't do much reading, however, on the night when it 
 should have come off. He occupied the time in knocking nails in 
 Herbert's walls, and hanging up the pictures that were stacked in 
 heaps on the floor. The noise didn't exactly suit his head, but it 
 would have been ungracious to say so, so he went about with it 
 wrapped up in a wet towel, and found room for all the pets of the 
 Ballet and the Ring, the eminent scholars and divines of Trinity, 
 the boating crews and endless college clubs of the 'Varsity that his 
 friends had thrust upon him. 
 
 Jayne had left a text behind him, which, as it was in Hebrew, 
 and none of them could read it, and it looked like work, they con- 
 siderately hung over his mantel- piece. The effect was incongruous, 
 but it was novel. 
 
 G-eraint — who was wining with some men below — came up to 
 remonstrate, and stayed to help, and brought his friends up with 
 him. 
 
 Notwithstanding this picture-hanging kept him up late, Herbert 
 was early at chapel the following morning, which is more than 
 most of the men of his staircase were, and his braces were not 
 trailing behind him, nor did he wear his slippers and betray other 
 evidences of a hasty toilet, as many Trinity men did who were to 
 be seen on that bright summer morning hurrying across the Great 
 Court. 
 
 Neither of the men who assisted in hanging the ballet girls and 
 the bishops put in an appearance at morning chapel, and when 
 
8o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert took his privileged walk in the Fellows' Garden, when the 
 service was over, he had the sweet May morning, with its song of 
 birds and scent of flowers, all to himself. 
 
 The purple lilac was nodding overhead, and the hawthorn was 
 scattering its summer snow at his feet, and down through a sunny- 
 aisle, with the gold of her hair shining afar off in the morning sun- 
 shine, Lilian Howell came to meet him. 
 
 He could not have passed her if he would — he had not got a wet 
 towel round his head now, but a modest college trencher, rather 
 limp in the extremities — for she stopped him in the midst of the 
 green alley with a swift, sudden reproach in her bright eyes. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Flowers, I heard that you were ill, that you had had 
 another accident.' 
 
 Herbert blushed, and replied guiltily : 
 
 ' Not an accident exactly. It was my own fault, Miss Howell ; 
 I don't deserve your pity.' 
 
 ' I don't think you do ; but it is very disappointing, when we 
 thought you were getting on so well. I hope it won't happen 
 again, Mr. Flowers ;' and she swept by him in her little print frock 
 with as magnificent an air as if she were the Master himself in his 
 rustling silk doctor's gown. 
 
 He watched her passing between the hawthorns and down the 
 sunny path, with the blue hyacinths crowding up at her feet, and a 
 lark singing overhead, with her rebuke ringing in his ears. He 
 was a very foolish undergraduate, for it sounded sweeter to him 
 than any words of praise that had ever fallen from any woman's 
 lips before, and he crept humbly back to his rooms, thankful for 
 these small crumbs of blame that showed that Lilian Howell was 
 disappointed in him. 
 
 He went straight to an untidy drawer in his writing-table, 
 tossing the contents impatiently over, and got out the forgotten 
 copy of those Latin hexameters, and recast them, touching them here 
 and there lovingly with a tender hand. He read them modestly to 
 his new friend Jayne, who now kept above him, who declared they 
 were first-rate. 
 
 Herbert had not much opinion of them himself, but upon his 
 advice he sent them in, and was more surprised than any other man 
 in the college when the intelligence reached him that he had won 
 the Latin hexameter prize. 
 
 Meanwhile Brown's affairs were a source of much anxiety to him, 
 almost as much, indeed, as to the foolish, improvident fellow him- 
 self. Their rooms were on the same landing now, hence they saw 
 more of each other, and Brown was rushing across at all hours of 
 the day, whenever he saw the coast clear of duns, to Herbert's 
 room, to pour out his weak, unavailing regrets, or to tell him of 
 fresh difficulties, that, like Job's, were daily closing in around him.. 
 
 The tradesmen of Cambridge, with delightful unanimity, were 
 down upon him ; possibly they had only now realized the leanness' 
 
THE BEDMAKER'S GHOST. 81 
 
 of his expectations. In his last term, just as he was going up for 
 his degree, they were besieging him for payment, and some had 
 written to his tutor. 
 
 He was much too cowardly to come to an understanding with his 
 persecutors, so he sported his oak and lived in a state of siege. 
 
 One morning, when things were quite at their worst, he came 
 flying into Herbert's room with an open letter in his hand. 
 
 ' Hooray !' he shouted, flourishing it before Herbert's astonished 
 eyes ; l hooray ! there's deliverance out of the hands of the 
 Philistines, Flowers ; just read this ! There's a fellow who lives at 
 a convenient distance come to the rescue. Isn't it quite Providen- 
 tial ?' 
 
 Herbert took the letter and turned it over with a curious feeling 
 of repugnance. 
 
 It was very nicely written, and it dated from quite an aristo- 
 cratic quarter in St. James's, and it bore a dainty little monogram 
 on the seal. 
 
 • Private and strictly confidential,' was written in a soothing and 
 agreeable manner in the corner. 
 
 Herbert opened the letter gingerly, with an indefinable reluct- 
 ance, and read : 
 
 'Dear Sir, 
 
 ' Should you require an immediate loan of a few hundred 
 pounds, I shall be happy to let you have it on " promissory note " 
 alone, without other surety or security, per return of post. As I 
 lend my own money, it places me in a position to do business upon 
 very favourable terms. 
 
 ' Yours truly, 
 
 'Amo? Smythe.' 
 
 1 Well,' said Brown eagerly, when he had finished the precious 
 epistle, and put it back with a feeling of relief in its envelope. 
 « Well ?' 
 
 ' Well ?' said Herbert, and they looked at each other in silence. 
 
 ' There can't be any doubt about accepting the fellow's offer,' 
 said Brown nervously ; his little white face was twitching, and 
 his weak, watery blue eyes were dreadfully eager. 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Herbert ; ' I hope, please God, I never shall 
 know anything about these fellows ; but I would ask someone who 
 knows more about it than we do — who's had experience in such 
 things. Why not ask Grinley ?' 
 
 Brown groaned. 
 
 'I owe him so much already !' 
 
 1 How much ?' Herbert asked. 
 
 He remembered how generously Grinley had behaved when he 
 had lost money to him at cards. 
 
 ' How much ?' repeated Brown drearily. ' Oh, a deuce of a lot F 
 
 4 It was twenty pounds the other day ; have you doubled it ?' 
 
 6 
 
82 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Brown laughed a dreadful little hollow laugh, and his white face 
 arew whiter under Herbert's scrutiny. , , 
 
 g < Doubled it ?' he repeated bitterly. « I owe Grinley two hundred 
 
 P ™Good heavens!' Herbert exclaimed. 'You don't mean to tell 
 me Brownjn your sober senses, that you owe two hundred pounds 
 
 "telambtg debts only ; that is, not on* -*£*£* 
 
 the other incoherently; 'we have had some other transactions. 
 You know I went to Newmarket with him W ound him^ 
 
 'And were brought home drunk after midnight. It a a wonder 
 you weren't sent down then, old man.' 
 
 < That's it I have no idea what happened. I have to take ma 
 word for it. I backed some confounded horse that he recom- 
 mended-he pretended to back it himself-and lost, and got into 
 Hence of a row, he tells me ; and-and-he advanced the money 
 to get me out of it, and brought me home. 
 
 ' And you don't remember anything about it t n n 
 
 ' Not a bit I had to take his word for it. He's got my I-O.U., 
 or promissory note, or whatever you call it, and I shall have to 
 raise the money some day.' u; mao if n = h* aa t 
 
 'It's a deuced ugly story,' said Herbert to himself as he sat 
 turning it over in his mind when Brown was gone. 'Its about 
 the shadiest thing I ever heard.' 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 A STILL, SMALL VOICE. 
 
 « A still, small voice spake unto me : 
 Thou art so sure of thy degree, 
 Were it not better have a spree ?' 
 
 In spite of Brown's protest, he did consult Grinley about the 
 money-lending affair, and the upshot of it was that Grinley offered 
 to introduce him to a man who would lend him the money on 
 
 be He r o t |ered, too, what was better still, to get a bill discountedfor 
 Brown through a friend, which he told him would save an awful 
 lot of interest-a bill due at three months, and renewable, of 
 course, at the end of that time, if not convenient for him to meet 
 
 1 'Of course he gratefully accepted this generous offer, and after 
 Hall he repaired, with an air of elation that was quite new to him 
 on his simple, cherubic countenance, to Grinley s rooms in King's 
 Parade. 
 
 Herbert heard him an hour after come up the staircase and slam 
 o Hnnr in with unwonted energy. He rather wondered that he 
 
 his door to with unwonted energy. 
 
 
A STILL, SMALL VOICE. S3 
 
 bad not come in to tell him the result, and he threw down his book 
 and hurried across the landing. 
 
 On entering the room he found Brown sitting in an armchair 
 before his empty grate with his face buried in his hands He 
 looked up when Herbert entered-a ghastly haggard face, with all 
 the soft lines of his fair, round, innocent youth, the simple artless- 
 uess that had won him the name of ' Cherub,' stamped out of it 
 
 Herbert closed the door softly and came over to him 
 
 'You've seen him, then, old fellow ?' he said, dropping his voice 
 quite unconsciously in a sort of involuntary pity. 
 
 Brown nodded his head, but did not speak. 
 
 ' Tou saw him ?' 
 
 An oath, or a sound that strangely partook of a groan and an 
 execration, fell from his white lips as he again buried his face in 
 his hands. 
 
 'What have you done? Herbert asked nervously; his voice 
 shook in spite of himself. 
 
 'I've given Grinley a bill, an acceptance, or some such infernal 
 thing, for two hundred and fifty pounds,' he answered desperately, 
 without looking up. J ' 
 
 •Two hundred and fifty pounds !' echoed Herbert aghast 
 
 He sat down now, and faced Brown with a face as white as his 
 own. 
 
 Brown got up nervously and walked, or rather staggered, over 
 and shut the outer oak. ' 
 
 1 For Heaven's sake be careful, Flowers !' he said, sinking 
 wearily back mto his seat; 'if this comes to the Dean's ears or 
 Routh s, I shall be sent down. G-rinley tells me I must not let a 
 living creature in the college know about it ' 
 
 ■ + ' ^wJ wPT D °V- f \ d Herbert bitterly. ' He couldn't afford 
 it What the deuce did he mean by extracting two hundred and 
 nrty pounds r 
 
 •It's that cursed debt I owe him,' Brown groaned, looking des- 
 perately into the empty grate. 'It's all square, you know he'd 
 got my acceptance for it. He's added another fifty to it for me 
 He wouldn t do it unless I agreed to include the two hundred ' ' 
 You shouldnt have agreed to this, Brown,' Herbert said softly. 
 You should have held out It's taking a mean advantage of you.' 
 I couldnt help it ; indeed I couldn't,' moaned Brown. 'The 
 fellows got such a hold upon me that he can turn and twist me 
 as he likes. I believe if he were to tell me to blow my brains out 
 I should do it,' he concluded gloomily 
 
 Next day he burst into Herbert's room with quite a flush of in- 
 dignation on his simple countenance. 
 
 'I say, this is too bad though,' he blurted out, throwing a little 
 heap of dirty Bank of England notes on the table. 'I agreed to 
 for interest" J g0t thirt y- fi ™-fifteeu pounds deducted 
 
 6-2 
 
84 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' Wasn't it in the bargain ?' Herbert asked indignantly, more 
 flushed and angry than Brown. ' If it wasn't, I'd go to the Dean 
 with it and expose him. It's a nasty, mean, blackguard trick !' 
 
 ' I'm afraid I can't say,' Brown answered hesitatingly. ' I was 
 so taken back, so bewildered by the whole thing, that I didn't pay 
 any attention to the terms. I took it for granted that I should 
 have the fifty. It would have stopped the fellows' mouths for a 
 time ; but what can I do with thirty-five ?' 
 
 Herbert had to seize his cap and gown and fly off to a lecture, 
 and left him doing a dismal sum in mental arithmetic — the first 
 mathematical problem of any kind that he had attempted this term. 
 He was so immersed in abstruse calculations as he crossed the land- 
 ing to his rooms that he came into collision with Cudworth, who 
 was flying down over the stairs, late as usual for lecture, with a 
 note-book in his hand, trilling his favourite comic song : 
 
 1 Oh, Kicklebury Brown ! oh, Kicklebury Brown I 
 What a silly old man you are !' 
 
 Brown evidently worked out the dismal problem to his satisfac- 
 tion, as he spent the whole of the following morning going round 
 ths town paying little bills, and stopping the mouths of his larger 
 creditors, as he termed it, when, however commendable the duty 
 he was performing, he ought to have been engaged behind his oak 
 preparing for the examination that came off on the morrow. 
 
 Then he went down the river and saw the crews practising, and 
 dropped into another man's rooms, and came back to his college 
 after dark without his cap and gown, and was proctorized on the 
 way. 
 
 It was his luck, he told Herbert, when the same thing happened 
 the following day as he was going up for his exam. 
 
 It was the first day, and the men who came early indulged in a 
 weed by the way, and threw the ends of their cigars, half alight, 
 on the steps as they went in, or stood calmly at the door knocking 
 out the ashes of their pipes against its sacred portal. But nobody 
 troubled them ; probably they were richer men — and certainly 
 luckier. 
 
 Brown came up late, with the end of a harmless little cigarette 
 in his mouth, and Nemesis steps up behind him, and, tapping him 
 on the shoulder, politely requests to be favoured with his name and 
 his college. 
 
 Crestfallen, and taking it as an omen of ill-luck, Brown goes in 
 to his exam. It was rough upon Brown, picking him out from 
 among a hundred others, but it was his luck. He cursed it often 
 enough, but it clung to him nevertheless. He was cursing it all 
 through the examination, when he ought to have been doing his 
 papers. But for that unlucky contretemps on the steps — a quarter 
 of a second would have saved him — he felt he could have done the 
 paper before him easily. Now he could not fix his mind upon it 
 
A STILL, SMALL VOICE. 85 
 
 for three consecutive minutes. The suave countenanced the Proc- 
 tor kept coming up between him and the printed page, and once 
 he found himself drawing from memory a tolerably correct likeness 
 of that famiblar face on his paper, under the serious impression 
 that it was one of the figures required by the examiners. 
 
 He went back to his college and cursed his luck for the rest of 
 the evening. Instead of preparing for the morrow, and sitting up 
 half the night with a wet towel round his head, as manv men in 
 Trinity were doing, he sat up wining with a man on another stair- 
 case, and was brought home and put to bed just as the sweet May 
 morning was breaking behind the gray battlements of the Great 
 Court. 
 
 Herbert had to drag him out of bed the next morning, and give 
 him a shower-bath, and ply him with small sodas, and carry him 
 off to the door of the hall where the examination was held, with- 
 out any breakfast. 
 
 He hadn't much faith in his getting through in that soddened 
 state, with all the bells in Cambridge, as he declared, ringing in his 
 ears. 
 
 However, there was no Proctor's face to come between him and 
 his papers to-day ; but a very strange thing happened, as he told 
 Herbert after : 
 
 ' That confounded yellow dog of Grinley's got in the place, and 
 was smelling around him all the time. It was a wonder the 
 examiner didn't turn him out, but nobody took any notice of it.' 
 
 Herbert locked him in his rooms after Hall, and took away the 
 key of his oak, under the fond impression that he would work till 
 bedtime ; but on going in some hours later he found an empty 
 brandy bottle on the table, and Brown helplessly drunk on the 
 floor. 
 
 He called Cudworth, who helped him to get him up and put him 
 to bed. 
 
 ' Oh, Brown,' Herbert remonstrated with him as he was struggling 
 oat of his clothes, ' this is too bad. Tou should think of Maria !' 
 
 ' That's just it, my — dear — fellah,' said Brown thickly ; ' done 
 nothin', 'pon my soul, but think o' Maria. Whatsh the shong, 
 Cudworth ? — you oughterknow ? — 'bout Missh Bailey ?' 
 
 ' All right, old fellow, only substituting Maria as the demoralizing 
 deity. Don't wonder at it, 'pon my word !' 
 
 He was thinking of the likeness of the pet of the ballet that was 
 still lying face downward among the litter on Brown's table : 
 
 1 Oh, Maria ! Unfortunate Maria I 
 He took to drinking gin and mm, and thought upon Maria !' 
 
 Brown went on his sorrowful way to the examinations ; but one 
 day it was a rat — ' a confounded great black rat was running about 
 the floor the whole time,' he explained, and he couldn't fix. his 
 attention upon his papers for a moment ; and though he looked 
 
86 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 round and pointed to it several times, nobody attempted to catch 
 it. 
 
 Another day his enemy took the form of a lizard. 
 
 ' Quite a harmless kind of a lizard,' he explained to Herbert, 'but 
 it was deuced odd that none of the other fellows took any notice 
 of them !' 
 
 ' Were there many of 'em ?' he asked, not that he believed for a 
 moment in Brown's illusions ; he thought he was a little overdone, 
 and the worry and anxiety he had lately gone through had upset 
 him. 
 
 ' Many,' Brown repeated ; ' the floor was black with 'em. I 
 shouldn't be surprised if I haven't brought some home with me. 
 
 He shuddered as he spoke, and Herbert saw him shake an 
 invisible something off his sleeve. 
 
 ' There, I thought so !' he said nervously. ' You saw that, 
 Flowers ?' 
 
 ' Come along, old man, and have a cup of tea,' Herbert answered, 
 leading him, shaking in every limb, across the passage. 
 
 He couldn't drink the tea that he poured out for him ; his hands 
 shook so dreadfully that he spilled the scalding liquid over his legs, 
 and his face grew ashen gray, and great beads of perspiration stood 
 ont on his forehead, and his eyes were bright and restless. 
 
 ' I don't mind telling you, Flowers,' he said in an agitated 
 whisper ; ' but there's been a snake up my sleeve all the day. 
 Don't touch it !' he cried out in alarm as Herbert, to humour him, 
 helped to relieve him of his coat ; ' it'll bite. It's a poisonous one, 
 too, by Jove !' 
 
 It was a very uncanny thing to see him, with a shudder of 
 loathing, shaking the invisible thing off his arm, and then, with his 
 teeth set and his eyes starting dreadfully, grind his heel down 
 savagely upon the something on the floor. 
 
 His horrible vision, whatever it was, was real enough to him, and 
 he lay back in his chair, after this effort, with a groan, covering his 
 face with his nerveless hands. 
 
 Clearly he could not be left, and Herbert waited beside him 
 until he heard a step on the staircase. It was Jayne limping 
 slowly up over the stairs. Somehow, his halting footstep always 
 sounded like a reproach in his ears. It was evidently so trying to 
 him to get up, and his rooms were on the top. Of course he had 
 made the exchange of his own free-will — had insisted upon it, 
 indeed ; but the irony of it smote upon Herbert's conscience 
 painfully. 
 
 He called him as he passed the door, and Jayne came in. The 
 abnormal excitement had passed for the moment, and Brown was 
 lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. 
 
 Herbert held up his finger with an air of mystery, and pointed 
 significantly to Brown, and in a constrained voice asked Jayne to 
 have a cup of tea. 
 
A STILL, SMALL VOICE. 87 
 
 He took the hint, and was dropping wearily into a chair on the 
 other side of the hearth, when Brown sprang up with a sudden 
 cry, and, pointing to the chair with a shaking hand, exclaimed : 
 
 ' Take care, take care ! Good heavens, it's in the chair !' 
 
 Jayne jumped up nervously and looked down, but there was 
 nothing but a harmless cushion that the little mother had worked 
 for Herbert. He caught sight of his warning finger and sat down 
 with a sigh. 
 
 * It's all right, Brown,' he said, quietly ; ' it's all right, my dear 
 fellow ; it's gone now, whatever it was.' 
 
 1 It was a snake,' said Brown with a shudder — ' a venomous black 
 snake. It was curled up where you are sitting ! It must have 
 slid off on the floor ; get a stick, a poker, Flowers ; it's under the 
 chair now. Kill it ! Kill it !' 
 
 He was shrieking these words out, and looking with an expres- 
 sion of sickening disgust and terror on the floor. Before Herbert 
 could stop him he had seized the poker from the hearth and was 
 striking fiercely, with mad frenzy, at some object before him. 
 
 ' Do you remember the brazen serpent, Brown ?' said Jayne, 
 limping over to his side and quietly taking the weapon from him. 
 He sat down beside him and held the poor fellow's clammy hand in 
 his. 
 
 The touch seemed to quiet him, and the spasmodic twitchings 
 relaxed. 
 
 ' Ye-es,' he answered feebly ; ' I remember — in Barnwell.' 
 
 'Exactly,' said the other, brightening up ; ' in Barnwell. They've 
 got a lot of serpents there — deadly ones ; and whenever they are 
 bitten there's only one thing that they can do ; there's only one 
 thing that you and I can do. You remember we were talking 
 about it the other night when you called for me ?' 
 
 'Yes, yes ; I remember,' Brown interrupted eagerly ; ' I know 
 the story. But you see, Flowers hasn't got one in his room. A 
 great mistake— a great mistake ! There ought to be one in every 
 room, with all these things about ;' and he looked down on the floor 
 with that dreadful expression of loathing and revulsion on his face. 
 
 ' Suppose we see if there's one in your room, Brown ; I shouldn't 
 be surprised if there isn't. If not, we'll soon set up one above your 
 bed that'll kill all the snake-bites in Cambridge.' 
 
 Between them they led him back into his room. On the way he 
 paused, and raised his foot and ground his heel down savagely upon 
 the landing as if he were crushing a reptile beneath it. 
 
 They got him to bed quietly upon the promise of setting up a 
 brazen serpent for him to look at, in case he should be bitten by any 
 of the creatures that he declared were crawling over his bed. 
 
 Herbert sat beside him while Jayne went upstairs to fetch it, 
 and to ask Cudworth to come down. 
 
 He returned presently with a large metal cross in his hand. 
 
 ' I'm no Romanist,' he explained to Herbert nervously ; 'but I 
 
88 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 like to keep this always before my eyes to remind me, beside its 
 great lesson, that the servant is not greater than his Master — that 
 suffering and sacrifice are the conditions of the highest life here. 
 I need to have it before me to remind me very often, I am so apt 
 to forget.' 
 
 ' You ?' said Herbert, with an uneasy consciousness of his own 
 shortcomings. 
 
 ' Yes, indeed,' said the other with a sigh ; ' when I see all 
 this youth, and strength, and lusty life around me, I am very 
 apt to complain. Why, I was jealous of you and Brown the 
 other day — poor Brown here ! — when I saw you punting on the 
 river.' 
 
 Brown looked up on hearing his voice ; he had dozed off in a sort 
 of stupor, and he awoke out of it with a start. 
 
 ' Have you got it ?' he asked anxiously. 
 
 ' Yes, dear fellow ; it is here,' said Jayne, holding up the metal 
 cross before his eyes. ' It isn't the cross itself, you know, but what 
 it is the symbol of, like that brazen serpent of old.' 
 
 ' The Barnwell one ?' 
 
 'Yes, certainly — the Barnwell one. There is only one, you 
 know !' 
 
 Brown looked up eagerly. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said with an air of relief, ' that's it ! Put it where I 
 can see it, Jayne ; there — there — they are coming on now — crowds 
 of 'em ! Put it there — quick — or it will be too late !' 
 
 They fixed the cross up on the opposite wall where he could see 
 it without effort, and for a time he was pacified. But his hands, 
 which lay outside the counterpane, were cold and clammy, and 
 twitched spasmodically, or clutched the bedclothes in a vague 
 purposeless, jerky way. 
 
 Herbert, who had never seen anything of the kind, had grown 
 white to the lips, and watched the poor fellow's movements with an 
 awful fascination. He could hardly recognise the easy-going, 
 simple-minded Brown of the cherubic countenance in the tremor- 
 stricken man before him. 
 
 Cudworth and Geraint came in and looked at him, and turned 
 away with blanched faces. A council was held in the adjoining 
 room. Geraint proposed to send his own doctor, who would keep 
 the matter dark. It was agreed that if it came to the ears of the 
 college authorities it would be all over with Brown. He had not 
 much chance as it was of getting through ; but if his tutor heard 
 of it he would send him down, or probably rusticate him alto- 
 gether. 
 
 • Think of his poor old father,' said Herbert, with a catch in his 
 throat , ' you don't know how he builds up on Brown's success. 
 You should see his letters ! And the girl he is engaged to !' 
 
 • Oh, Maria !' Cudworth broke in involuntarily. 
 Herbert stopped him with a warnings gesture. 
 
A STILL, SMALL VOICE. S9 
 
 « I beg your pardon,' he said humbly ; ' I believe that confounded 
 girl is at the bottom of it !' 
 
 ' Hush !' said Herbert sternly ; ' she is the best creature in the 
 world. She is far too good for Brown !' 
 ' O-o-oh !' 
 
 Cudworth's unfriendly criticism of Maria was cut short by the 
 entrance of the bedmaker, who was immediately sworn to the 
 strictest secrecy ; so also was the gyp, whose opinion it was thought 
 desirable to take upon the state of the patient in the inner room. 
 If experience gave weight to his opinion, he was certainly an 
 authority. 
 
 ' D. T. !' he exclaimed, with the air of a connoisseur, when he 
 had looked at Brown for a minute or two, and listened to his 
 ravings. ' Quite a mild case, gentlemen. Only it'll be as well to 
 put razors and firearms out of his way, or anything that he'd be 
 likely to do hisself a mischief with.' 
 
 ' You don't think we want a doctor ?' demanded the men in a 
 breath. 
 
 ' No, not as long as he keeps quiet. Tie him down in the bed, if 
 he wants it, with a sheet or two. I'll put it round him, and you 
 can tighten it if he gets troublesome. But someone must sit with 
 him — two it should be. It's like most other madnesses ; he might 
 kill hisself, and you too, in one of these paroxysms, at any 
 moment.' 
 
 With this cheerful possibility of a speedy termination of the 
 miserable drama that was being enacted in the narrow little sleep- 
 ing-room, the men decided to do without medical assistance, and 
 to take their turn at watching through the night. 
 
 ' A doctor means a nurse, you know, sir,' said the man of ex- 
 perience, wagging his head. ' No doctor would let him be left in 
 that state without a proper nurse, most likely two ; and then it 
 couldn't help coming to the tutor's ears. Safe to come out, and you 
 know what 'ud happen.' 
 
 The men knew quite well what would happen, so they watched 
 through the night by turns ; two in the inner room with the poor 
 wretch tossing on the bed, and two keeping guard, and ready for 
 any emergency in the keeping-room beyond. 
 
 Through the early part of the night he lay so still that they 
 thought he slept, and opened the window to let in the cool, fresh 
 air of the night. The Great Court was quite silent, and every 
 light, except the lamp by the gateway, was out, and the moon was 
 shining on the roof of the chapel. 
 
 Herbert stood looking out, thinking at that moment how the 
 same moon was shining on the blue waters of the Torridge, and on 
 the humble roof at Bideford, where the little mother slept beneath ; 
 and, maybe, it was shining through a narrow casement he had 
 looked out of, oh, so many, many times, upon that pure pillow. 
 The thought of what it shone upon there brought the tears into 
 
go A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 his eyes, as he looked out into the Great Court, and at the many 
 windows where men slept, and remembered that in rich or poor 
 homes, scattered far and near, there was the same importunate love 
 ever storming heaven's high gate for those who worked — or idled 
 — here. 
 
 A cry from the bed made him turn hastily round. Brown had 
 suddenly sat up, and was gazing with a look of unutterable terror 
 on his face at something on the bed. Great drops of perspiration 
 were on his forehead, and he was pointing with a trembling finger 
 at a heap of bedclothes he had tossed aside in his unrest. 
 
 ' Look !' he cried, with dreadfully starting eyes ; ' look !' 
 
 Herbert looked involuntarily. There was nothing to be seen but 
 a confused heap of bedclothes. 
 
 ' There ! Don't you see it ? The cobra ! See, it is coiled up at 
 the foot!' 
 
 ' My dear fellow, there is nothing there, indeed,' said Jayne 
 soothingly. ' See !' and he rolled over the heap of bedclothes. 
 
 Brown gave a dreadful shriek that rent the air of the quiet quad, 
 and rose upright in the bed. 
 
 ' See !' he cried in a frenzy of terror, ' see, he is uncoiling ! He 
 is crawling up higher — higher !' 
 
 He leapt from the bed before Jayne could detain him, and flew 
 past Herbert to the window. He caught him by the arm as he was 
 struggling madly to get through, and the others rushing in from 
 the outer room, they secured him, and between them they got him 
 back to the bed screaming and cursing, and sobbing wildly. 
 
 No one could do anything with him but Jayne, and he never left 
 his side through the night, soothing him in his wildest paroxysms, 
 and allaying his terrors as the unclean shapes his imagination had 
 conjured up thronged about him. He ever pointed him to the 
 cross upon the wall, and bade him in his fiercest agonies, as the 
 phantasmal horrors crowded around him, to ' look up !' 
 
 The poor terror-stricken wretch would raise his bloodshot eyes 
 to the opposite wall, and gaze at it with a hungry yearning gaze 
 that went to the hearts of impressionable undergraduates who 
 gathered round his bed. 
 
 From gazing at it so long he began to smile, and from smiling to 
 weep ; and so, with a blessed rain of tears, he fell asleep — sobbed 
 himself quietly to sleep, with Jayne's arm thrown round him as he 
 had slept in the days of his innocent childhood in his mother's 
 arms. 
 
 The sun rose over the Great Court of Trinity, and the blue sky 
 of the sweet May morning appeared clear and cloudless above its 
 turrets and battlements, and still he slept on within the shelter of 
 Jayne's encircling arm. 
 
 When the chapel-bell rang he was still asleep, and the cramped, 
 weary arm was still around him. Jayne would not move an inch, 
 but stuck to his post with quite a happy smile on his poor tired face. 
 
BROWN PATRONUS. 91 
 
 'Not for the world! not for the world!' he said tinder his 
 breath when the others strove to relieve him. ' The slightest 
 movement will arouse him. He will awake by-and-by, please God 
 — quiet, and in his right mind.' 
 
 Herbert left Cudworth with him, and he and Geraint went 
 across the quad in the morning sunshine to chapel. 
 
 He was so shaken with the events of the night, and with the 
 memory of the awful Nemesis of his youthful follies that had over- 
 taken the poor stricken wretch in that darkened room on the other 
 side of the court, that he could not meet the clear eyes of the 
 Trinity Lily. He could only bow his head down very humbly over 
 his desk, and, with tears running down his cheeks, repeat those old 
 familiar words — that he had found need to repeat so often of late 
 — that he had learned at his mother's knee : ' Lead us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from evil !' 
 
 Surely he had never repeated them so earnestly before ! 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 BROWN PATRONUS. 
 
 ' I passed beside the reverend walls 
 In which of old I wore the gown.' 
 
 All the precautions that Brown's friends had taken to prevent the 
 nature of his illness coming to the ears of the Dons were unavailing. 
 
 Some Fellows, whose rooms looked out into the Great Court, 
 had heard Brown's frenzied cries during the night : the sound may 
 not have been unfamiliar to them ; and the tutor had sent up to 
 make inquiries before chapel, and the Dean himself came over 
 after. 
 
 He met Herbert on the stairs, and learnt from him something of 
 Brown's condition. Cudworth was asleep on the sofa when they 
 went in, and he turned over uneasily and murmured an inaudible 
 ■ Oh, Maria !' 
 
 Brown was still sleeping with Jayne's arm around him ; he 
 raised a warning finger when they entered, then, seeing that it was 
 the Dean, his white, tired face blushed rosy-red. 
 
 The Dean of Trinity nodded very kindly over to him, and asked 
 him how long Brown had slept. 
 
 They told him since daybreak. 
 
 ' Then he'll do,' he said, looking with a grave pity in his kind 
 eyes on the sleeping man ; * he'll do until his father comes. I'm 
 very sorry for him — at the close of his career, too. I am very 
 sorry indeed for him ! Poor Brown ! poor Brown !' 
 
 He left the room, and Herbert followed him on to the landing. 
 
 ' You spoke of his father, sir V he said modestly when they 
 reached the top of the stairs. 
 
92 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' Yes,' said the Dean, turning round ; ' his father has been sent 
 for. I am very sorry for him, a most worthy man ! An old 
 college friend ; indeed, we took our degrees together. I am more 
 grieved for him than I can tell.' He went down the stairs talking 
 to himself, and unconsciously turning round the big ring he always 
 wore on his little finger, which he was so in the habit of consulting 
 when he was in any perplexity, or moved by the misdeeds of 
 others, that the men irreverently termed it the ' Dean's familiar.' 
 
 There was a very touching story about that ring, which some 
 men had heard, and they never heard it without tears. 
 
 Brown did not awake till nearly noon, and then he awoke quite 
 himself ; that is to say, he awoke pale and haggard, with feverish, 
 restless eyes ; but the visions of the night, the awful visions 
 wrought by disease and fear, were gone — quite gone. 
 
 He could not understand why Jayne was there, nor why the men 
 looked at him with such a strange pity in their eyes. 
 
 Jayne stayed with him while he made a hasty toilet, and held his 
 peace guiltily while he searched unavailingly for his razors ; and 
 then Herbert came and sat with him, and Jayne and his cross went 
 upstairs. 
 
 Herbert was silent and very sad ; his heart was too full, thinking 
 of the wrecked life before him, to talk much. Brown was peevish 
 and irritable, finding fault with the examiners, with the college 
 authorities, with the 'Varsity, with everybody and everything but 
 his own folly. And all the while the sword of Damocles was 
 hanging over his unconscious head, and none of his friends had the 
 courage to warn him before it fell. 
 
 Later in the day a step was heard on the stairs, an unfamiliar 
 step, that made Herbert's cheek turn pale, and he rose hurriedly 
 and left the room. 
 
 At the door he encountered a florid, genial-looking man of 
 middle age, rather out of breath with climbing the stairs. He 
 wore the dress of a country parson, and his pleasant round face was 
 so exactly like Brown's that Herbert recognised him in a moment as 
 Brown's father. 
 
 ' Mr. Brown, I believe ?' said Herbert modestly, with his back 
 against Brown's oak. 
 
 The florid man nodded ; he was too out of breath to speak, and 
 Herbert saw there was a shade of anxiety on his genial face as he 
 looked over his shoulder at the closed door of his son's rooms. 
 
 'Would you mind stepping in here a minute ?' Herbert went on 
 nervously, opening the door of his own rooms. 
 
 'Is — is anything the matter?' Brown senior asked, his fresh- 
 coloured face suddenly paling. 
 
 ' No, not much ; at least, not now,' Herbert answered awkwardly. 
 
 And then he shut the door upon him, and took him over to the 
 window, and told him as gently and considerately as he could 
 something— not all — about Brown's illness. 
 
BROWN PATRONUS. 93 
 
 4 It's these confounded examinations !' said Brown senior, with 
 quite natural impatience. ' There is so much competition in these 
 days, and so much is expected of a man, that it's no wonder some 
 of them break down. He kept up until it was all over, you say, 
 and then broke down. I'm not at all surprised !' 
 
 Herbert assured him with quite unnecessary warmth that Brown 
 had kept up untd the examination was quite over. 
 
 ' You'll be very careful with him, sir ; you will not let him get 
 excited ?' he said, as he followed Brown's fond parent to his son's 
 door. 
 
 ' Aye. aye !' said old Brown cheerfully ; s you may be sure I shall 
 be careful.' 
 
 Half an hour later the door opened again, and Herbert saw 
 father and son crossing the quad together, arm in arm, talking of 
 the old time when Brown senior wore the gown of Trinity. He 
 stopped in the middle of the court and pointed out his old rooms ; 
 and the tenant, who was wining with his friends, looked down 
 superciliously upon him, and drew back abashed when he saw the 
 light shining on the genial old face that was recalling its youthful 
 days. 
 
 Herbert watched them till they entered the doorway that led to 
 the tutor's rooms, and then he turned away with a groan. 
 
 Jayne saw them, too, from his garret, but he didn't groan : he 
 went down on his knees instead, on a very worn strip of carpet by 
 his bedside, and he asked the Kind Hand that is ever occupied with 
 the affairs of man to — but what right have we to penetrate into 
 that sacred presence-chamber ? 
 
 We may be sure of one thing : he didn't ask in vain ! 
 
 Half an hour later Brown and his father recrossed the Great 
 Court. The fountain was playing, the sun was shining ; but all 
 the light had gone out of their changed faces, as they walked sadly, 
 and apart, across the quad. 
 
 Herbert heard them stumble up the staircase, and the door of 
 Brown's room shut. 
 
 He did not dare to go in. He knew exactly what had happened, 
 as if he had been a witness of that interview in Mr. Routh's room. 
 He saw the stern face of the tutor ; he heard the cold, merciless 
 words that fell from his thin lips as he poured out into the fond 
 father's ears the story of his son's delinquencies : the old, old story 
 of time wasted in aimless dissipation, folly, gambling, drunkenness, 
 rioting, and — worst of all — in general defiance of the rules of the 
 college. 
 
 Brown came in presently with a white and stricken face. 
 
 ' It's all over, Flowers,' he said, with a quivering lip. ' I'm sent 
 down. I'm rusticated !' 
 
 'Good heavens!' Herbert exclaimed; * it's not so bad as that, 
 surely ?' 
 
 'It isn't that 1' Brown said speaking thickly, with a sob in hia 
 
94 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 throat. ' I deserved all that ; but it has broken the dear old 
 fellow's heart !' 
 
 He could not trust himself to say any more, and he turned away 
 to hide the tears that were smarting in his eyes. 
 
 ' Good-bye, old fellow, good-bye ! You'll see about my things ? 
 I can't stay to pack 'em myself ; the others, I know, '11 help.' 
 
 ' Of course I will,' said Herbert, and a nasty mist came before hia 
 eyes, and blotted Brown's homely figure quite out ; ' but you don't 
 mean you are going away so quick ?' 
 
 ' I must, to look after the governor. Poor old chap isn't fit to 
 travel by himself.' And the tears in Brown's eyes brimmed over 
 and ran down his white cheeks. 
 
 Herbert watched them crossing the court. The old man — who 
 had aged tremendously in this mauvais quart d'heure — clung to 
 Brown for support as he tottered across the quad with his head 
 upon his breast, and all his honest pride and ambition dead within 
 him. 
 
 There were none of Brown's friends pressing round to take leave 
 of him as he went on his sorrowful way. Some choice spirits who 
 were coming in the gateway, when they saw his melancholy figure, 
 slunk away, and passed on the other side of the quad. 
 
 There was a sound Herbert well knew on the stones below, and 
 Jayne was limping painfully after his retreating figure. He came 
 up to him at the gate. 
 
 ' God bless you, Brown !' he said, holding out his hand. ' Good- 
 bye, old fellow ; God bless you !' 
 
 And so, with a benediction, Brown passed beneath the great 
 gateway of Trinity. 
 
 Things went on pretty much as usual after Brown went down. 
 His rustication was spoken of with wonder and awe for several 
 days, and then he dropped out of men's minds. 
 
 The examinations were over, and preparations for May week 
 were being made on every hand, and everybody was much too busy 
 to think of Brown. Herbert had more time on his hands than 
 most men : he had no examination until his Tripos — which was too 
 far off to affect him yet — except, indeed, his college examinations, 
 in which he took a very good place, and carried off some prizes 
 nicely bound in russia leather and emblazoned with the college 
 arms. 
 
 His place in the college boat had been given to another man since 
 his accident, so his part would be on the bank in the May races. 
 Ee didn't sing, so he was no good at the college concert, which was 
 one of the most brilliant affairs of May week. He didn't dance, 
 ?*nd he hadn't a guinea in the world to pay for a ticket for the ball 
 that the men of Trinity were getting up ; and he couldn't enter- 
 tain his friends, or other men's friends, on anything more sumptuous 
 than a dry biscuit and coffee. 
 
 He hadn't any people coming up for the May week, like other 
 
BROWN PATRON US. 95 
 
 men. He hadn't any people, indeed, to come up, but the little 
 mother, and she would have looked sadly out of place amid the 
 gaily-dressed visitors who thronged the courts of Trinity, in her 
 rusty silk gown that had done duty for best occasions so long as 
 Herbert could remember. 
 
 No ; it wouldn't do for the little mother to come up — at least, 
 not now. 
 
 He may have looked forward, in one of those day-dreams of his, 
 to a proud and happy day — not for many terms yet — when Lucy 
 would wear a bran-new silk gown, provided especially to do honour 
 to the occasion, and would take her seat in that privileged row, 
 with a smile of such supreme joy shining on her dear face that 
 made his heart swell to think of. 
 
 Alas for dreams ! 
 
 Other men's mothers sat there now. Other men's fathers, beside 
 Brown's, complacently strolled through the busy courts, pointing 
 out to their women folk the rooms they once occupied, the windows 
 they once looked out of. 
 
 Gentle, kindly, dignified old fellows, with something of pride 
 beaming on their faces, prowled about the hall and chapel reviving 
 old memories, or went mousing about the staircases their footsteps 
 had so often trod, to look at that familiar door where another name 
 now appeared in white letters ; and mused on the landings of the 
 generations of undergraduates that had since passed over that 
 threshold, of the stormy youth who had disturbed the peace of that 
 quiet staircase, while shadowy figures of their youth came crowding 
 out of the past in all the freshness of their lusty manhood. 
 
 Geraint's people hadn't come up — he had begged them to wait 
 until he took his degree next year, he told Herbert with a sigh. 
 Jayne's aunt had come up, and he limped all over Cambridge with 
 her, and showed her all the sights as conscientiously as if she were 
 his cousin and in her teens. Cudworth's people had come up in a 
 party, and he had no end of pretty sisters, whom the other men 
 admired very much. Perhaps he did the same with regard to theirs, 
 as he was heard to express a desire to exchange sisters with another 
 man for a time, or for the May week, at least. 
 
 Spurway's people had run up from town for the May boat-races, 
 and were staying at the Lodge. Herbert saw Lady Millicent's 
 face in chapel, and it immediately brought before him a vision 
 of the little mother. Not that they were the least alike ; but it 
 reminded him of her servitude, and of the patient sacrifice that 
 she was daily and hourly making for him in wearing her lif e out 
 with those unruly children in the Bratton schoolroom. 
 
 He couldn't very well grind his heel into the floor of the chapel, 
 as the Dean objected to noises ; but he looked very glum over his 
 Prayer-book, and sang the surliest hymn he had ever sung in 
 Trinity. 
 
 The sight of Muriel Spurway didn't soften his heart one whit, 
 
96 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 nor the memory of that red rose she had given him, oh, ages ago ? 
 It had gone the way of the roses of youth, and those early fires 
 were all dead. The flame of that youthful love had gone completely 
 out. Herbert remembered, with something of shame and humilia- 
 tion, as he looked at her, across the surly hymn, in the stalls of the 
 college chapel, that foolish passion that had once consumed him. 
 The light had gone out of her bright eyes now — for him at any 
 rate — and the elegantly attired woman of fashion, resplendent in 
 the latest creation of Worth's, looked a very poor thing beside the 
 Trinity Lily in her simple white muslin. 
 
 As he was coming out of chapel Geraint stopped him. He was 
 crumpling up a little pink note in his hand, and his face was 
 flushed, and he was biting his under-lip impatiently, a habit he had 
 if anything annoyed him. 
 
 * Oh, Flowers,' he said, stopping him on the chapel-steps, ' I want 
 you to take an oar to-morrow night ; I am taking some ladies up 
 to Ditton. There will only be two of us ; will you come ?' 
 
 Herbert began to say he had promised to run with some other 
 men on the bank beside his boat, and had pledged himself to ring a 
 dinner-bell, or spring a rattle, or blow a horn, or do some other 
 idiotic thing, by way of stimulating the crew at critical moments 
 in the race. 
 
 ' Oh, hang the dinner-bell ! You must come, Flowers ; it's no use 
 saying you can't. The fact is, I promised the ladies to bring 
 you.' 
 
 Herbert did not need to ask who were the ladies ; Geraint was 
 still crumpling up the little pink note between his fingers. 
 
 ' Did they really ask me ?' Herbert inquired, blushing furiously. 
 
 ' Well, they told me to bring someone, and I knew they would 
 like you. The fact is, there's a little secret in the matter. Hebe 
 — that is, Miss Hebe Bellenden — hates Grinley like Lucifer, and he 
 has proposed to take them down the river, and he was so obliging 
 as to mention my name as one of the party. Miss Bellenden has 
 accepted his escort, and Hebe is fretting her pretty eyes out. It's 
 deuced hard, that just for one day she can't have a respite from 
 that confounded fellow ;' and Geraint imitated Herbert's evil 
 example, and ground his heel into the well-kept college gravel. 
 
 There was a corresponding light in Herbert's eyes, and his breath 
 came quick. 
 
 'Yes,' he said eagerly. 
 
 ' Well, I just propose to take the boat up half an hour before the 
 time, and get the ladies in, and hang about the bank as if we were 
 waiting for — for that devil, and you'll be at hand and slip in, and 
 off we'll go before he and his confounded party come up.' 
 
 ' But the ladies,' said Herbert ; ' will they be willing ?' 
 
 Geraint gave a low laugh. 
 
 ' All right,' he said with a chuckle ; * there'll be a row, and Misa 
 Bellenden '11 fume — and Hebe will have a holiday.' 
 
BROWN PATRON US. 97 
 
 His handsome face was flushed and eager, and a little tender 
 Miiile played round his mouth. 
 
 ' What do you say, Flowers ?' 
 
 Herbert may have had that little business of Brown's weighing 
 heavily on his mind, and was not sorry for an opportunity of 
 relieving his feelings, so he gave up the pleasing manipulation of 
 the dinner-bell with good grace. 
 
 There was the usual confusion on the bank on the first day of 
 the May races, and the ladies were only five minutes late. Con- 
 sidering their toilettes, an hour would have been pardonable. 
 There was a little sensation in the crowd as the belles of Cambridge 
 came up to the landing-stage, and it parted involuntarily on either 
 side to let them pass through to the bank. 
 
 Geraint sat alone in his boat serene and smiling — a noble type 
 of the Cambridge undergraduate ; a courageous, even-tempered, 
 muscular giant, well-balanced and modest, but ready and prompt of 
 action if need be. 
 
 He helped the ladies into the boat, and waited, paddling slowly 
 along the bank, for Grinley. 
 
 Hebe took the rudder and steered like an experienced cox amid 
 the craft that crowded the river. How lovely she looked in her 
 light gauzy gown, with the sun lighting up the pale gold of her 
 hair, and touching ever so tenderly her white, proud beauty, and 
 the perfect lines of her perfect figure ! Not that she was pale by 
 any means to-day : there was a delightful flush on her cheeks — it 
 might have been owing to the pink parasol she carried — and a light 
 in her dark eyes that Herbert did not remember to have seen there 
 before. 
 
 He walked along the bank, keeping up with the boat till they 
 reached the corner, when, at a signal from Geraint, he got in. 
 
 ' How late you are, Mr. Grinley !' Miss Bellenden began, and 
 stopped. She didn't exactly turn white beneath her rou — her 
 fixed colour ; but the tone of her complexion altered, and she 
 glared at Herbert with her hard bright eyes in a way that made 
 him feel very creepy. Hebe Bellenden had expected somebody — 
 anybody but Grinley — but she hadn't expected him, and she paled 
 visibly beneath the very becoming pink of her sunshade. 
 
 It was not quite comfortable for Herbert, but he made the best 
 of it, and pushed the boat off into the middle of the stream. 
 
 Of course there were explanations, but there was no scene, and a 
 kind of wet blanket fell upon the party. Herbert did his modest 
 best, but he was awfully uncomfortable. He had not met th6 
 Bellendens since that dreadful night. If they had forgotten it, he 
 hadn't, and it kept coming up before him in the midst of that 
 merry scene in the most trying way. 
 
 Hebe took no notice of him after the first five seconds, and Miss 
 Bellenden glared at him severely with her magnificent eyes all the 
 way up to Ditton, as if he were the culprit and not Geraint. 
 
9 8 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Her other attractions were discreetly veiled from the sunshine, 
 but Herbert had the satisfaction of making two discoveries— first, 
 that the fixed colour on her cheek was quite independent of nature; 
 and second, that her shining teeth were false; and accident 
 revealed this to him in a flash, and he blushed quite guiltily at the 
 discovery. . 
 
 There could be no doubt about her arms— her beautiful white 
 arms, that were shown to perfection in the tight well-fitting 
 sleeve of her Surah gown. Herbert caught himself looking at 
 them, by a strange kind of fascination ; and remembered when he 
 had last seen them bared, carrying that awful burden. 
 
 Grinley passed them when they were drawn up at Ditton, and 
 found a place for his boat about a dozen boats off. He gave no sign 
 of annoyance at Geraint's little manoeuvre beyond a slight eleva- 
 tion of his eyebrows as he passed the party rowing calmly up the 
 stream. There were two men with him in the boat, a smart 
 one, with crimson cushions for the ladies. Herbert didn't know 
 the men, except by reputation : they were Magdalen men, and 
 one of them had the enviable reputation of spending five thousand 
 a year in Cambridge, against the ordinary undergraduate's five 
 hundred. 
 
 Hebe smiled as the boat passed, and exchanged a meaning glance 
 with Geraint, and the elder Miss Bellenden bit her beautiful red 
 under-lip. She had preserved a stony silence since the little ex- 
 planation, and when the boats were drawn in she signified hei 
 desire to land. 
 
 The grass at Ditton Corner wasn't exactly like velvet, and the 
 landing didn't improve the ladies' gowns— or their tempers. 
 
 Geraint helped Hebe out first, and he gave Herbert a look which 
 he quite understood as he essayed to help Miss Bellenden across 
 the bridge of boats. It is never an easy affair to get across to the 
 land, and the situation can be prolonged at will. 
 
 Herbert prolonged it until Geraint and his companion were 
 quite out of sight, and then, seeing a pink parasol some distance 
 ahead, he plunged into the crowd and led Miss Bellenden a cheer- 
 ful dance in pursuit of it in quite an opposite direction. 
 
 When they came up to the parasol, the owner was not Hebe 
 Bellenden, but an older friend of Herbert's, Muriel Spurway, and 
 between her and Lady Millicent the Etonian was walking lugubri- 
 ously, looking as if he would very much like to exchange sisters 
 with somebody. 
 
 Herbert blushed, as was his wont, and bowed to the ladies, and 
 Miss Bellenden consoled herself by making enquiries about the 
 Etonian and his people. The foolish fellow was so glad of any 
 excuse to avert her wrath, and to keep her out of Geraint's way, 
 that be answered all her questions quite effusively. He even 
 remembered afterwards that he had taken some trouble to calculate 
 the exact number of acres the Spurways owned in North Devon, 
 
BROWN PATRON US. 99 
 
 and the approximate amount of Sir Hugh's rent-roll ; and that lie 
 had assured her that the estate was wholly unencumbered. 
 
 AVhile he was yet eloquent in his description of the wealth and 
 beauty of that great estate on the banks of the Torridge that 
 would one day be Tom Spurway's, they came across Grinley. Miss 
 Bellenden spoke a few words to him in a low voice, and as she 
 spoke Herbert saw an ugly look come into his eyes, but not a 
 muscle of his face changed. 
 
 1 1 have just met your sister,' he said quite sweetly ; ' she is with 
 our friend Geraint, under the tree ; they have been looking for 
 you everywhere.' 
 
 He stooped down over Miss Bellenden's white bonnet as he 
 finished speaking, and the rest of the sentence only reached that 
 lady's private ear. 
 
 ' I think I'll get back to the boat,' Herbert muttered awkwardly. 
 It was not a delightful position, and he had no wish to intrude 
 upon Miss Bellenden's secrets. 
 
 One never exactly cares to be made a cat's-paw of, even in the 
 interest of one's friends, and he strode back through the crowd to 
 the boat. 
 
 He had not sat there long before Geraint came up, looking as 
 black as night. He was alone. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said gloomily, with language expressive of his feelings, 
 ' they have taken her away. She didn't exactly go easy, but that 
 fellow Grinley has some power over her I can't understand. By 
 Jove ! you should have seen her eyes flash when he put out his 
 hand to help her into his confounded boat. I didn't know there 
 was such a devil in her !' 
 
 ' Did she go with him, after all ?' Herbert asked. 
 
 His heart was beating, and he would very much have liked to 
 have had Grinley within reach of his arm — all other things, of 
 course, being equal. 
 
 ' Go with him ?' said Geraint with a groan. ' Miss Bellenden 
 managed that. She just whispered something that I couldn't catch 
 to her, and she stepped quietly into the boat ; but she never touched 
 the fellow's hand when he offered to help her, and she drew away 
 her gown as she passed him with nothing short of loathing that 
 was quite superb ! Poor little Hebe ! I'd give something to know 
 the secret of that fellow's influence over her.' 
 
 Herbert smiled drearily. He could have thrown some light upon 
 it, maybe, but his tongue was tied. 
 
loo A FELLOW OF TRINITY, 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL 
 
 JULIE. 
 
 Like Dr. Whewell, when he scored his first great University 
 success, Herbert conceived it necessary to get a new suit of clothes 
 in which to appear at the Senate-house and recite his Latin hexa- 
 meters before the Vice-Chancellor and the University. 
 
 He didn't at all see the way to pay for it, and, with Brown's 
 awful example before his eyes, he ordered it of a smart Cambridge 
 tailor in much fear and trepidation. 
 
 The Senate-house was crowded — at least, the galleries were — 
 with noisy undergraduates, and in the body of the hall the sweet 
 girl undergraduates of Girton and Newnham listened to the inflated 
 Latin and rhythmic Greek ' as she is now spoke.' 
 
 The most gratifying circumstance attending a success is the 
 pleasure it gives one's friends. But there were no dear ones to 
 share in Herbert's exultation, there was no proud, glad, tender face 
 to greet him as he mounted the rostrum, and blushed above his 
 bands when he turned over the leaves of his prize-poem. 
 
 Lilian Howell and Muriel Spurway were there beside the wife of 
 the Master of Trinity, and Jayne was in the gallery just above him. 
 
 He was quite sure of his sympathy, and it helped him through 
 his task. If there were a hundred voices cheering him when he 
 stepped modestly up to the dais to receive the gold medal at the 
 hands of the Vice-Chancellor, he only heard one, and that was the 
 voice of Jayne. His eyes were as unreliable as his ears. When he 
 stepped out of the gloom of the Senate-house into the bright noon- 
 day sunshine of King's Parade, he was conscious of having seen an 
 indistinct ring of faces, and the sober background of the walls and 
 the windows, and the shadows lurking in the corners, but only one 
 face stood out among them all — the face of Lilian Howell. Muriel 
 Spurway was in the outer ring, and she was the best-dressed 
 woman in the Senate-house ! 
 
 There was nothing further to keep him up in Cambridge, so he 
 packed his books and his scanty wardrobe — he left the new suit 
 behind — and shook hands with his friends, and went down by a 
 very slow Parliamentary train to Bideford. 
 
 He took the gold medal, and the handsome volumes emblazoned 
 with the arms of Trinity, that he had won in his college examina- 
 tions, down to the little mother at Bideford. 
 
 He paid another visit to the Senate-bouse before he went down. 
 He went to see the men in the honours-list take their degrees. 
 The pleasant voice of praise had already whetted his appetite for 
 fame, and it only wanted the scene in the Senate-house on that 
 memorable day to fire his ambition. He stood in the undergraduates' 
 gallery looking down on the brave scene below. The Vice-Chancellor 
 
JULIE. ioi 
 
 inhis robes, the Dons in their scarlet gown", the pretty girls in the 
 gallery behind smiling down, the honours men in their fur hoods 
 smiling up — was he moved by these foolish things, or was it the 
 glory for its own sake that moved him so deeply ? The Chan- 
 cellor's gold medal was all that he had to show Lucy of his 
 University successes for the year. He had a few flimsy documents 
 with printed headings, bearing a variety of cabalistic characters, 
 the contemplation of which did not give him wholly unmixed 
 satisfaction, but these he did not show her. He crushed them into 
 a drawer of his writing-table, and turned the key upon them, which 
 is a very easy way to get rid of one's troubles. 
 
 The little mother was very glad to see him, and folded him 
 tremblingly, this tall, handsome giant that he had grown, to her 
 tender heart. 
 
 She crept in when he was asleep once more in his own little room 
 beneath the eaves, to steal a long look at him and satisfy her hungry 
 eyes. 
 
 It was not the manly down on his lip that betokened the subtle 
 change that had come over the artless, impetuous Herbert of the old 
 happy days, but an intangible shadow had come between the 
 widow and her son, and that warned her, only too surely, that she 
 no longer held the first place in her boy's heart — the first place in 
 his life. 
 
 Yet it was, in spite of the shadow, the happiest vacation that 
 Lucy could remember. She had her boy once again all to herself. 
 They spent a<long happy month at Clovelly ; and, climbing together 
 the steep village street, or rambling on the shore, with the blue 
 waves of the Severn Sea breaking at their feet, Lucy recalled the 
 freedom and confidence of the old days when they were all the 
 world to each other. 
 
 He was all the world to her still, but his world had widened, and 
 -^he was no longer the central figure in it. 
 
 He did not tell her much about his illness ; he had had an 
 accident on the water — all men have accidents. He did not tell her 
 anything about the bedmaker's ghost ; he had changed his rooms — 
 all men change their rooms. 
 
 There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have told her 
 every little incident and event in his life, and been sure of her 
 interest and sympathy. He was sure of it now, but he needed it 
 no longer. 
 
 He was learning, as all the young birds do in time, to fly alone, 
 and soon he would return to the parent nest no more ; and oh, the 
 loneliness of the solitary watcher whose chief est solace is to recall 
 the noisy, troublesome days when the nest was full ! 
 
 The days of that short summer holiday were winged — golden 
 days to be remembered and dwelt upon by the widow in her soli- 
 tude ; fond tender memories of perfect love and unshaken con- 
 fidence in her dreary calendar. 
 
102 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The sweet eyes were sadder now, with a wistful look in them, 
 and the bright hair was faded, Herbert remarked, with a sadden 
 fear at his heart, as he watched her in the critical sunshine on the 
 shore. 
 
 Her brief holiday over, Lucy returned to her teaching up at the 
 great house, and with gloomy impatience he noted how languid 
 and weary she was after these long tiresome lessons, and how 
 drooping and bent the little active figure, that used to climb so 
 briskly the steep hill that led to Bratton Court. 
 
 He would groan within himself, and swear that she should go up 
 there no more, and grind his heel into the little worn hearthrug — 
 there was a hole in it now, and Lucy was too weary to mend it — 
 in his impotence to prevent it. What could he offer as a substitute 
 for the welcome guineas that daily teaching brought into the 
 widow's slender purse ? His sizarship was insufficient for his own 
 wants ; and there was that cursed roll of flimsy paper that he had 
 stuffed into the drawer of his writing-table — the Nemesis that was 
 awaiting him. 
 
 He wore his patched clothes with becoming resignation, because 
 it was the little mother's patient fingers that patched them. That 
 long bill of the Cambridge tailor's, that he had crushed up in his 
 hand unread, was for club blazers and flannels, and the indispens- 
 ables of an athlete's wardrobe.- He had brought none of the glories 
 of the University clubs to dazzle the eyes of the simple West- 
 Country folk ; he had locked them up in a shamefaced sort of way 
 in his rooms in Trinity. The little mother would be asking all 
 sorts of awkward questions about them, so it was quite as well he 
 left them behind. 
 
 His club blazer would have been a glorious object in the sunshine 
 on the broad bosom of the Torridge, but he modestly left that 
 bahind too ; but he wore an old Cambridge cap with the well-known 
 colours of the boating club, that was much too weather-stained an 
 affair to provoke inquiry. 
 
 Tom Spurway, who, since that memorable day when Herbert won 
 his cups, had ceased to ' confound the beggar's impudence,' often 
 condescended to paddle with him between the green hills and the 
 yellow sand-banks, arrayed in the fearful and wonderful striped 
 garments in which the youths of Trinity are wont to disport 
 themselves. 
 
 This pleasing spectacle invariably drew an admiring spectator to 
 the shore. Julie always found on these occasions an opportunity 
 of bringing her young charges for a walk on the bank of the swift- 
 flowing Torridge that skirted the grounds of Bratton Court. 
 
 A change, an imperceptible change to most men, had come over 
 the fair young gouvernante since Herbert had seen her last. He 
 could not say in what it lay, he felt it rather than saw it ; still it 
 puzzled him, and he studied the pretty, foolish moth, that was so 
 eager to burn itself in any candle that came in its way, aa a 
 
JULIE. ioj 
 
 carious problem, none the less interesting for being human and 
 pretty. 
 
 She was ever so much prettier than of old, to begin witb. Her 
 cheeks were pinker ; her skin was whiter ; her large, soft, untrust- 
 able eyes were darker and larger, and curiously heightened by an 
 artistic bit of colouring beneath. Her fine bushy brows were 
 delicately pencilled, and her hair — well, here description fails ; it 
 was necessary to see Julie's coiffure to appreciate it. 
 
 Added to all these charms of person, she was no longer down at 
 heel, and my lady's ill-fitting old gowns no longer concealed the 
 delightful contour of her mignon figure. 
 
 Julie had taken her charms in hand, and was making the most of 
 them for the benefit of the foolish undergraduates. 
 
 She had the field all to herself, and was free to use her powder and 
 her patchouli, without any fear of Lady Millicent's displeasure. 
 
 Her ladyship and Miss Muriel were still in Scotland ; and Mr. 
 Tom Spurway had run down alone to Bratton for a little shooting 
 before he went back to Cambridge. 
 
 He offered Herbert a gun, but the poor sizar had not the money 
 to pay for a license. He went up to the tennis-court as of old, and 
 came across his old enemy the peacock, who remembered him quite 
 well, and greeted him with his accustomed urbanity. 
 
 Herbert did not throw a stone at him, neither did he go up the 
 back stairs. He refused altogether to enter the house ; but he was 
 willing enough to play tennis, as of old, with his fellow under- 
 graduate and Julie and the children. 
 
 He was very often up at the house during the closing weeks of 
 the long vacation, and would wait on the lawn, or in the shrubbery, 
 to walk back with the tired little mother when her weary day's 
 work was over. Julie would sometimes go with them, and stay at 
 the widow's cottage until it was quite late, and the early dusk of 
 the autumn evenings had fallen, when Herbert could do no less 
 than walk back to the house with her. 
 
 The stately old housekeeper of Bratton, who was as formidable 
 a person, in her way, as my lady herself, opened the door to her 
 once or twice, when she had stayed later than usual, and rebuked 
 the giddy little governess for being out so late in no measured 
 terms. 
 
 She looked with disfavour upon Herbert, whom the timid little 
 creature could not let go until the door was opened, and the foolish 
 fellow would stride angrily away, mortified at the woman's in- 
 solence, and vowing that he would never set foot in the place again, 
 only to be brought back the very next night, an hour later, at 
 Julie's apron-strings — an unwilling chevalier ; but who could let 
 such a timid creature return through those autumn woods alone ? 
 
 It was a wet, lowering morning when Herbert returned to Cam- 
 bridge. The gray, sullen clouds hung over the hills, and the tide 
 came in hoarsely, with low, angry mutterings, as it lashed the piera 
 
104 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 of the old bridge over the Torridge, as Herbert passed over it on 
 bis way to the station. 
 
 He would not let the little mother go with him. It was an un- 
 kindly morning, and she was weak and low-spirited, and would be 
 sure to break down, as she always did, when sbe parted with him. 
 
 He had reached the little garden-gate, where the tall hollyhocks 
 were dropping great tears on his path, and the brown-eyed sun- 
 flowers were sadly watching him over the wall, when some impulse 
 made him turn back. 
 
 The little mother was standing in the porch waving her tender 
 adieux, and he caught her in his arms with the old impulsive 
 affection of his childhood. 
 
 His conscience was pricking him for his unworthiness of this un- 
 selfish love that was so freely sacrificing itself for him, and the 
 memory of those crumpled bills pressed hard upon him. 
 
 ' God bless you, mamsy !' he said, with a sob in his throat. ' I 
 am an ungrateful beggar ! Forgive me if I have been selfish ! 
 Whatever happens, you will never lose faith in me ?' 
 
 His voice shook, and a mist came before his eyes ; he was thinking 
 of those wretched bills. 
 
 The little mother's arms were around him, and her tears were 
 falling on his face. 
 
 ' My darling, whatever happens, I shall never lose faith in you !' 
 
 He kissed her, and shouldered his bag, and waved his adieux as 
 the turn of the road hid her from his sight. 
 
 ' What did he mean by such a question ?' she asked herself many 
 times during that sad day. 
 
 She did not feel equal to going up to the great house until the 
 afternoon, and there a surprise awaited her. Julie had flown. 
 
 The demure little governess had left her patroness without a 
 word of notice or warning, and the delighted children were kicking 
 up their heels in the schoolroom in playful expression of their en- 
 tire satisfaction and approval of the unlooked-for event. 
 
 Julie had taken but little luggage with her — only, indeed, a small 
 handbag containing her few personal trinkets. Her wardrobe, or 
 rather my lady's wardrobe, lay piled up in a heap on the floor of her 
 room. 
 
 All the old gowns and faded finery that her ladyship had given 
 her were spread out upon the floor, piled in an untidy heap, and 
 crowned with old shoes and artificial flowers, and on the top an ill- 
 written scrawl was pinued : 
 
 'My Lady, 
 
 ' I return you all your old gowns and lef t-offs. I have need 
 of them no longer, 
 
 'Julie.' 
 
 ' What does it mean ?' acked Lucy of the stately housekeeper, 
 who had taken her into the girl's room. 
 
'WHILE THE GRASS GROWS. 1 105 
 
 Her face was ashen white, and her voice was unsteady as she 
 epoke. 
 
 It means,' said the housekeeper grimly, ' that the little minx has 
 gone off with your son, Mrs. Flowers !' 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 'while the grass grows.' 
 
 1 Another name was on the dcor.' 
 
 October term, and Cambridge was full of fresh young faces. 
 
 Herbert felt quite old as he looked at them. His freshman's 
 year was over, and he did not need his glass to tell him that he was 
 not the same artless undergraduate who had looked into it twelve 
 short months ago. 
 
 He had done many things in the time to account for the change 
 that he saw there : he had grown a moustache, in its incipient stage, 
 for one ; he bad earned a highly-coveted University distinction, and 
 won some college prizes — things seldom gained without leaving 
 tome mark behind. Success leaves its stamp as well as failure. 
 
 The young, fresh faces that filled the courts would all undergo 
 that same mysterious change by-and-by. They would all grow 
 finer or coarser as the master they served set his stamp upon them. 
 
 Herbert had gone up higher in chapel, and sat at another table 
 in Hall, but he had still two whole years before him before he 
 could lighten the load the little mother's frail shoulders had to 
 bear. The grass took such a long time to grow I 
 
 He was always reminding himself of that whisper he had heard 
 in the woods of Bratton : ' Wait a minute.' It had seemed to have 
 a prophetic meaning to him then ; but he was already getting tired 
 of waiting, the minutes were so long. 
 
 Sometimes he was tempted, like the old Master of St. John's, to 
 pack up his few belongings and steal away under the cover of the 
 night. 
 
 He was out of place here, he told himself, among rich men. He 
 was not even, with the most rigorous economy, and with many 
 painful shifts and humiliations, able to keep out of debt. Clearly 
 it was his duty to go. 
 
 The old Master had thought the same when he shouldered his 
 pack and crept out of the gateway of his college under cover of the 
 oarkness of the night. Dick Whittington had, no doubt, many 
 similar visions of perplexity and unfitness when he stole away iii 
 the early dawn ; but they both went back, or were brought back s 
 and very humbly and patiently trod the thorny path, that by-and- 
 by led them to great distinction and honour. 
 
 Herbert didn't get even so far as the gate of Trinity. He sat 
 behind his oak working all da;, with a desperate earnestness, deny- 
 
106 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ing himself his accustomed run in Fenner's before breakfast, and 
 his spell on the river in the afternoon, and he burnt the midnight 
 oil with a reckless disregard of his own health and his powers of 
 endurance. 
 
 The other men of his staircase expostulated with him in vain. 
 G-eraint made one or two ineffectual attempts to carry him off to 
 the Bellendens', and Jayne almost succeeded in taking him to 
 Barnwell. 
 
 He did go there sometimes to bring Jayne back ; but he never 
 helped in the work. 
 
 ' It wasn't in his line,' he explained very modestly ; 'perhaps he 
 should see his way clearer by-and-by.' 
 
 There was a new tenant in Brown's rooms, and a new name 
 painted in white letters over Brown's door. How many times had 
 a new name been painted over that door ? 
 
 It was a name very familiar to Herbert — a name that he had 
 heard from his cradle spoken with a certain awe ; but he would 
 rather have seen Brown's there. 
 
 Tom Spurway had changed his rooms this October term, and 
 come over to Herbert's staircase, and his name greeted him every 
 time he opened his own door. 
 
 Perhaps this was why he kept his oak so persistently sported. 
 
 It was not Spurway 's fault that they were not better friends. 
 He treated the poor sizar with quite condescending affability. He 
 did him the honour the first day he came up to borrow his ink- 
 stand, his own having been broken in transit. Herbert carried the 
 silver inkstand, with the long Latin inscription, across the landing 
 with a little swelling of pardonable pride. The old coach had been 
 a Fellow of Trinity, and the Spurways had been Squires of 
 Bratton unto the tenth generation — mighty Nimrods in their way, 
 but never a scholar or a divine among them. 
 
 Nor did Spurway's condescension end here. His bedmaker 
 having omitted to order his groceries, he did Herbert the favour of 
 borrowing his tea and sugar, and coffee and squish — otherwise 
 marmalade — and other little domestic items, as long as the poor 
 fellow's cupboard held out. 
 
 He even condescended to borrow Herbert's gold stud, having 
 broken his own and lost the key of his dressing-case. 
 
 The bedmaker conscientiously hesitated before going on this 
 errand. 
 
 'Mr. Flowers has only got one, sir, and he's a-wearin' it hisself,' 
 she remonstrated. 
 
 * Oh, never mind,' shouted the condescending youth ; ' let him 
 take it out. Tell him I'm going to a concert.' 
 
 And Herbert did take it out, and appeared at the college concert 
 
 in the Guildhall with a black, beady thing of Jayne's in his bosom. 
 
 Tom Spurway always noticed him affably on the staircase, and in 
 
 the quads, if none of his own set happened to be in sight, and sat 
 
'WHILE THE GRASS GROWS: 107 
 
 near him in chapel, and elbowed him in Hall ; but beyond the gate 
 of Trinity he didn't know him. 
 
 One must draw a line somewhere, and the heir of Bratton drew 
 it at Trinity Gateway. 
 
 A great many distinctions have been drawn at that fine old gate- 
 way ; they are being drawn, indeed, every day. There is a wide 
 entrance of noble proportions for the many, and a narrow doorway 
 of mean dimensions to admit the few. 
 
 Tom Spurway was an elegantly attired youth, and the chefs 
 cFceuvre of the Bond Street tailor fitted to perfection his handsome 
 undergraduate person, and his French boots were the shiniest in 
 Trinity. The flower in his button-hole cost half a crown every 
 morning, and the pretty maiden who pinned it in his coat, it was 
 rumoured, charged half a crown extra for her trouble. 
 
 Herbert, with his turned coat, with those tell-tale marks in the 
 seams, and his poor worn boots down at heel, and his patched 
 trousers, was no fitting companion for the gentleman-commoner 
 who lounged — the centre of an admiring group — down King's 
 Parade. 
 
 There were few other undergraduates who wore highlows and no 
 straps, and Berlin gloves, at Trinity, whose coats were white at 
 the seams, and shiny at the shoulders. Jayne's were very often ; 
 he had no money to spend upon himself — he wanted it all for 
 Barnwell. He and Herbert usually took their short afternoon 
 grind together on the Trumpington Road, and were snubbed — with 
 becoming humility — by the magnificent youth who exhibited the 
 latest fashions in that favoured locality. 
 
 Herbert was so ridiculously proud and sensitive that he blushed 
 like a girl when Spurway ignored his nod of recognition one day 
 v, hen they met, each surrounded by his own party of friends. He 
 never did it again, for Herbert never gave him the chance. 
 
 The heir of Bratton, to do him justice, made amends the very 
 same night by sending his gyp across the landing, with a very polite 
 message, to borrow Herbert's lamp, as he had knocked over his own. 
 He was always knocking over something, or losing something, 
 which enabled him to lay an obligation on the men of his staircase 
 by borrowing their china, and books, and groceries, and forgetting 
 — like a nobleman — to return them. 
 
 Herbert sent across his lamp, and took his books upstairs into 
 Jayne's room, to do his work by the light of his lamp. He might 
 have saved himself the trouble. The lamp certainly was there, 
 well trimmed and reflecting itself in Jayne's shining mahogany, 
 which was uncovered, and innocent of books, papers, or any working 
 Utter. 
 
 The kettle was singing on the hob, and a tray, with cups and 
 saucers and a big coffee-pot, stood on a side-table, and Jayne waa 
 cutting up a cake. 
 
 'My dear fellow,' he said, 'this is an unexpected pleasure.' 
 
rc8 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert looked at the festive preparations, and prepared to 
 retreat. 
 
 ' Fact is,' he explained, ' I didn't know you were expecting 
 anyone. I had come up to work.' 
 
 Jayne got between him and the door. 
 
 ' Exactly,' he said ; ' and your work is here. I have been asking 
 God for the last hour to send someone to help me, and He has sent 
 you.' 
 
 Jayne had such very old-fashioned notions about answers to 
 prayer, and he was always upsetting his friends by declaring that 
 some quite every-day event was a special interposition of Provi- 
 dence. 
 
 ' I have some boys coming,' he explained, 'members of my night- 
 class. I am going to give them some coffee and talk to them, and 
 I am sure you have got a message for them too.' 
 
 It was too late for Herbert to draw back. There was a sound of 
 clumsy, shuffling footsteps on the stairs, and a number of boys from 
 Barnwell were crowding the landing outside Jayne's door. 
 
 He didn't wait for them to knock, but stood in the entry with a 
 beaming face and invited them in. 
 
 They came in awkwardly, and stood in knots till he found them 
 places, and Herbert did good work in carrying round the coffee 
 that Jayne dispensed. The cake held out wonderfully, so did the 
 sugar. The sugar-basin wasn't lost on this occasion, in the midst 
 of the feast, as it had been at another ' coffee ' that Herbert 
 remembered in those very rooms, with oh ! so much shame and 
 humiliation. 
 
 The boys from Barnwell behaved lovely, having, after repeated 
 efforts, succeeded in finding convenient places for their superfluous 
 arms and legs. The business of the evening began by the lads 
 drawing ap around Jayne's shining mahogany, and bringing out 
 their Bibles — not at all sheepishly, but with quite delightful pride. 
 
 They were Bibles to be proud of — well bound and good print — 
 and they made quite a handsome show upon the table against 
 Jayne's little well-worn volume that he took from an inner pocket. 
 They were Geraint's gift, he afterwards explained to Herbert, and 
 this was the first public occasion of using them. 
 
 Reading aloud is not the especial forte of Barnwell, but with 
 Jayne's help they got through their verses very creditably. He 
 stopped them once, when there was a good deal of shuffling of feet 
 going on, and reminded them that there might be someone 
 reading below, and dwelt for a moment on that especial Christian 
 obligation — which may have been new to some of them — of con- 
 sidering the feelings of others. 
 
 There was no more scraping of feet, and when he delivered his 
 brief address you might have heard a pin drop. And then he 
 asked Herbert to speak. 
 
 Herbert had never spoken in his life in public. He had never 
 
' WHILE THE GRASS GROWS.' 109 
 
 addressed any larger meeting than the sixth-form of his school at 
 Bidef ord, and then he had something definite to say. But he stood 
 np and looked round on the expectant faces. What could he say to 
 them ? He remembered their poor homes, and their hard lives, 
 and the work that lay before them in the world, and then he spoke 
 a few very plain, simple words to them on Christian manliness. 
 
 When his tongue was once loosed he could speak freely enough 
 to such a humble audience. He had been, and was still, indeed, 
 poor enough himself to descend the social ladder and meet these 
 ignorant lads half-way. He didn't venture to talk to them, as the 
 men of Trinity were fond of talking in the Union Debating Club, 
 of the evils of intemperance, overcrowding, insufficient education, 
 and inadequate codes of religion and morality. But he told them 
 if they were willing to educate themselves he would help them and 
 he would give up an evening a week to them. 
 
 And so, without Jayne's solicitation, he had pledged himself to 
 work in Barnwell. 
 
 He went downstairs after the boys, who, remembering their lesson, 
 stole quietly out and crossed the quad with stealthy footsteps. On 
 the staircase he met G-rinley going into Spurway's room. As he 
 opened the door, Herbert saw, by the light of his own lamp on 
 Spurway's table, a number of men playing cards, who hailed 
 Grinley's entrance with a shout. 
 
 He nodded to Herbert, and asked him if he were coming in ; he 
 held the door open long enough for him to see that Geraint, and 
 Cudworth, and the other man on the staircase were there, but 
 Spurway had not invited him. 
 
 He shook his head and went into his dusky room. By the light 
 of the fire he saw a letter lying on his table, and, searching about, 
 he found a candle to read it by. 
 
 It was from Brown, and with the shouts of the men who were 
 playing cards in the room opposite in his ears, he read Brown's 
 letter : 
 
 ' Dear Old Man,' it began in Brown's small uncertain hand- 
 writing, ' You will see by the address that I am still at home, and 
 with no prospect, so far as I can see, of getting anything to do. 
 My father and mother are goodness itself. They have never 
 in any form reproached me, or shown that they are disappointed in 
 me, and God knows they must be ! 
 
 ' The governor has been trying to get me into a bank ; but the 
 manager says, with his long list of applicants, he can hardly promise 
 me an opening if I wait years for it. Then there has been some 
 talk of my emigrating to America, to a cousin of my mother's. 
 Fancy me a farmer in the States ! 
 
 ' Smith, who gave such famous wines, and was sent down abso- 
 lutely a few days before I was (Routh promised not to explain 
 more than was necessary to his governor, the reason being that he 
 
no A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 went ti Newn arket, and stayed out till 1.30 with an absit), has 
 gone, I hear, to Australia. He was a scholar, »«»*- remember, and 
 would have taken a first for certain, and very lmely got a Fellow- 
 ship, and now he's roughing it in the bush ! 
 
 1 It seems awfully hard that a little thoughtless folly, no real 
 guilt or wilful crime, should alter the whole course of a fellow's 
 life, and that no second chance should be given him ! 
 
 ' When I think it over, I cannot believe I have done anything 
 bad enough to cause my expulsion. I am sometimes tempted to 
 write to the Dean ; you know he was always very kind, and I 
 treated him beastly, and ask him to get Routh to give me another 
 chance. My pride rather revolts against it, but I think Thorpe 
 would, if he looked at that ring of his : you know the story. 
 
 • Would you mind speaking to him ? Remember a fellow has 
 only one life, one chance. 
 
 4 Yours, dear fellow, to a cinder, 
 
 *DlCK.' 
 
 ' P.S. — The governor knows nothing about that horrible bill, and 
 Grinley has got the man to renew it.' 
 
 As Herbert finished Brown's letter, Geraint came in, and they 
 talked it over together. 
 
 4 It is deuced hard on a fellow,' said Geraint meditatively. ' It's 
 rough on Brown ; he isn't nearly so bad as half the fellows here, 
 and yet he gets sent down for an example to the rest, and ruined 
 for iife. Why, that fellow Spurway over there has lost more 
 money to-night at cards than Brown has lost all his life. He has 
 been gambling every night since he came up ; he has got into the 
 Bellendens' set ;' and here he groaned and kicked a big coal in the 
 grate into a hundred splinters. 
 
 ' He'll stand a good deal of bleeding,' said Herbert bitterly. 
 
 ' So he may ; but a fellow can't go on for ever. Grinley's got 
 him hard and fast. He was at Newmarket with him the other day, 
 and he didn't get back till after midnight. I've been there with 
 Grinley myself, and I know what that means. And he keeps a 
 mistress at Linton, and she drives about Cambridge in his dog-cart ; 
 she was at Newmarket with him.' 
 
 ' A mistress ?' said Herbert, looking up with a sudden interest in 
 his tone. ' Have you seen her ? What's she like ?' 
 
 4 Yes, I have seen her : she was at the football match the other 
 day. Grinley introduced her, and she was at the theatre in the 
 evening, with a lot of fellows round her. She isn't at all shy of 
 appearing in public' 
 
 ' You have not told me what she's like,' said Herbert impatiently. 
 
 * Like ! Oh, a little foreign thing — all eyes and a fringe.' 
 
 4 You say Grinley was with her. Is he smitten, too ?' And 
 Herbert laughed a low laugh. 
 
 4 Grinley smitten ? Never fear it's one of his moves. He'« 
 
• WHILE THE GRASS GROWS.' in 
 
 as cold-blooded as a fish ; bat I don't see exactly what he's driving 
 at.' 
 
 ' I — I thought,' said Herbert, blushing at his temerity, that he 
 was smitten in another direction — that he was in love with the 
 youngest Miss Bellenden.' 
 
 Geraint looked up with a sudden flush on his face, and made a 
 fierce attack on Herbert's fire. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said savagely, ' He will marry her some day, I suppose, 
 if ' but he didn't finish the sentence. 
 
 1 If the lady is willing ?' Herbert suggested presently. 
 
 ' Willing be hanged !' he answered with an oath. ' Hebe will never 
 be willing. She may be forced into it ; I believe she will be ; but she 
 will never be willing. He has a hold upon her, like he seems to get 
 upon everybody, and she can't throw him off. Such fellows ought 
 not to be let loose upon society without being labelled "dangerous." ' 
 
 ' Why doesn't he marry Miss Bellenden?' Herbert suggested. 
 
 Geraint laughed. 
 
 ' Oh, she's an old University hack. She has been engaged to be 
 married to no end of fellows in her day, and got damages out of 
 some of 'em. Oxford got too hot for her, so she came here. When 
 Cambridge won't hold her longer, and I fancy she has been putting 
 on the screw too strong lately, she'll turn 'up in Dublin, or some 
 other place where there are innocents abroad.' 
 
 * And Hebe ?' Herbert asked, more with his eyes than his tongue. 
 
 ' Oh, she's in the same boat. She's lived upon blackmail all her 
 life ; she's been trained to it, and she beats 'em all in it. She 
 belongs to the devil, body and soul, unless — unless ' 
 
 Geraint did not finish his sentence, but sat with the poker in hand 
 driving at the back of Herbert's fireplace, till he broke it in half in 
 his hands. 
 
 ' Oh, I am so sorry,' he said ruefully, looking at the two damaged 
 ends. 
 
 ' Oh, never mind,' said Herbert ; ' but you didn't finish what you 
 were saying — " unless " ?' 
 
 ' Unless I am a fool and a villain !' 
 
 And Geraint rose from his seat. The solitary candle had gone 
 out, and the fire had burnt low, and he stumbled over the furniture 
 in the dark to the door. 
 
 CHAPTER XT. 
 
 A PRETTY HORSE-BREAKER. 
 
 Herbert sent his commons down to Geraint's room the next morn- 
 ing, and while they were at breakfast a letter was brought in. 
 
 It did not need the faint, suggestive perfume, or the delicate 
 familiar hand, to tell who the little pink note was from. Geraint's 
 
H2 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 heightened colour told its own tale. He threw down the nota 
 impatiently, with an oath, when he had read it. 
 
 ' By Jove !' he exclaimed, with an angry flush on his face, ' that's 
 too bad ! Grinley proposes to take that little foreign creature of 
 Spurway's to the Bellendens', and Miss Bellenden has promised to 
 receive her. Hebe's furious !' 
 
 ' I should think so,' said Herbert. ' What's his motive ?' 
 
 1 An infernal one, you may be sure !' And Geraint pushed away 
 his breakfast untasted, and went over to the window. ' If it were 
 not for — for — well, for one thing, I'd take her out of it. Oh, 
 Flowers, I'm the most miserable wretch in the world !' 
 
 The confession was such an unexpected one, and the poor fellow's 
 attitude was so utterly wretched, as he threw himself into a chair, 
 with his face buried in his hands, that Herbert got up and came 
 over to him. 
 
 ' It's not so bad as that, old fellow !' he said encouragingly. 
 
 ' It's about as bad as it can be,' said Geraint with a groan. ' I've 
 half a mind to tell you all about it. It's wearing me to death.' 
 
 'If it will be any relief for you to tell me,' said Herbert 
 modestly — ' I'm sure if I can do anything.' 
 
 ' Do anything ? It's past that. No one can do anything, unless 
 they put a bullet through me. Sometimes I think that would be 
 the shortest way.' 
 
 ' Hush !' said Herbert gravely. 
 
 He was thinking of that other man, and it sent an involuntary 
 shiver through him. 
 
 ' It's all very well for you, who have never known a real passion 
 in your life, to say hush ! The fact is, Flowers. I'm Hebe 
 Bellenden's slave, and I'm engaged to marry another woman.' 
 
 1 I'm very sorry,' said Herbert simply. 
 
 ' And that isn't all,' said Geraint moodily ; ' but she is the best 
 and noblest woman in the world. She's too good for any man, 
 and — and — I'm throwing her over wilfully, with my eyes open, 
 for — for — well, you know, Hebe Bellenden ; and she isn't exactly 
 the woman you would like your wife to be, is she, Flowers ?' 
 
 ' No !' said Herbert emphatically. 
 
 ' Exactly ; yet I have asked her to marry me. And as soon 
 as I have taken my degree I intend to make her my wife. You 
 must be my best man, Flowers. I must wait for my degree, for 
 probably I shall have to get my own living. My father will, most 
 likely, disinherit me, and we shall go abroad.' 
 
 'Does Hebe Bellenden know this ?' Herbert asked gravely. 
 
 ' No,' said Geraint sadly ; ' she will never know what she has 
 cost me. You have no idea of my father's pride and ambition for 
 me, Flowers. I was to take his seat for the county ; and our place 
 in the North — it's been in the family since the Tudors — was to 
 have been rebuilt, and Mary Barclay, the girl I am engaged to 
 marry, has a million of money.' 
 
A PRETTY HORSE-BREAKER. 113 
 
 ■ I am very sorry,' was all Herbert could say. 
 
 He was very sorry, and he went mooning about all the rest of 
 the day without any heart for his work. It might have been his 
 own case. He was half in love with Hebe Bellenden already, and 
 a little encouragement would have fanned the spark into a 
 flame. 
 
 And if she had encouraged him ? 
 
 He was quite afraid to answer that question, and grew quite 
 warm in a very draughty corner of his room at the possible result. 
 He always chose the coldest seat in the room to work in. Nothing 
 like cold feet and a draught for reading. 
 
 ' No,' he told himself, ' there was no seat for the county, and no 
 Mary Barclay waiting for him ; but Hebe Bellenden wasn't exactly 
 the wife he should like to present to the little mother.' 
 
 He put up his books and went for a long grind round Grant- 
 chester. His nerves were too shaken to accommodate himself to 
 Jayne's halting footsteps, and he swung along at a good five miles 
 an hour, with a stout ash stick he had cut in the hedge at Bideford 
 for his companion. 
 
 Turning sharply round a curve in the road, he came across a 
 smart dogcart, with a pair of high-stepping thoroughbreds. The 
 driver was a lady, and, as the sight was an unusual one, he turned 
 round and looked after her. 
 
 The figure certainly was familiar, and the pose of the head, with 
 the jaunty little hat, he seemed to know quite well. The lady was 
 alone, except a smart groom on the back seat, and she drove with a 
 magnificent recklessness that did not betoken familiarity with the 
 ribbons. 
 
 Herbert did not recognise her, but somehow she carried his mind 
 back to his home and the woods around Bratton. 
 
 As he mounted his staircase Geraint shouted to him from 
 beneath, and he came down. A pink note was lying open on the 
 table, and he was white with rage. 
 
 ' Hallo !' said Herbert, ' what's up ?' 
 
 1 What's up ?' repeated Geraint slowly, but his lip was quivering 
 with anger. ' I'll tell you what's up. If it had happened to havo 
 been Grinley instead of you going up those stairs I should have 
 kicked him down them ; I should have punished his beauty in a 
 way that he wouldn't be likely to forget.' 
 
 ' Almost a pity it wasn't,' said Herbert sympathetically. 
 
 He was thinking of Brown. 
 
 1 If he had any pluck in him I'd call him out,' said Geraint ; ' but 
 he'd be sure to sneak out of it, and I should only get sent down.' 
 
 1 You haven't told me what he's done ?' 
 
 1 Yes, I have ; I told you last night. He got Miss Bellenden to 
 promise to receive that — that female of Spurway's, and to-day she 
 has called — drove herself over in a dogcart — and Hebe has been 
 forced to receive her.' 
 
 8 
 
il 4 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert whistled. That was the— the female he had met on the 
 Trumpington Road. 
 
 ' Think of my wife receiving that — that woman !' 
 
 Geraint was quite white with passion, and there was a dangerous 
 look in his frank eyes. 
 
 ' Why didn't she refuse ?' said Herbert bluntly. 
 
 ' Aye, that's the question ! Why didn't she ? She's got plenty 
 of pluck, and when her spirit's once up she's a very devil ; but 
 Grinley and her sister have got some hold upon her which I can't 
 understand. There is only one chance for her : to take her away 
 from them.' 
 
 ' Is she willing ?' 
 
 ' No, she is not willing, unless I can take her away to some place 
 where they can never follow her. It is not an easy or a delightful 
 thing to wed Hebe Bellenden. It means giving up everything one 
 values — home, friends, country, and leading the life of a vagabond 
 and a fugitive.' 
 
 Herbert's eyes asked a question his lips dared not frame. 
 
 ' Is the game worth the candle ? It would not be to most men ; 
 but it is to me. She is my fate ;' and Geraint walked to the window 
 and looked gloomily across the quad. 
 
 ' What will you do ?' Herbert asked presently. 
 
 'I — I shall see Grinley, and probably I shall horsewhip 
 him.' 
 
 Geraint saw Grinley that very night in Spurway's rooms, but he 
 didn't horsewhip him. 
 
 ' Well ?' said Herbert, when he came out. 
 
 He had rather expected high words, and he had left his door ajar 
 in case he should be wanted. Spurway had been out while Geraint 
 had his little explanation, and was now coming leisurely up the 
 etairs, accompanied by some of his friends. 
 
 ' Are you coming in ?' he bawled out to Geraint, but the othei 
 shook his head and went into Herbert's room. 
 
 ' Well, you haven't horsewhipped him ?' 
 
 • No, I wish I had. The fellow's condescended to explain ; 
 there's some confounded mystery. There always is a mystery with 
 Grinley, and, as it isn't my business, I can't pretend to fathom it. 
 The upshot is that Hebe will have to receive Madam Spurway till 
 I can take her out of it.' 
 
 Herbert saw the lady and the dogcart in Cambridge the following 
 day. Everybody saw her, indeed. She was driving more carefully, 
 but with a certain audacious manner that drew all eyes upon her, 
 Jayne was with him, turning over some books outside a noted 
 bookshop at a busy corner in Sidney Street, as she passed. To his 
 wonder and surprise she nodded to him, and he found himself 
 blushing guiltily, and bowing to her before the eyes of all 
 Cambridge. 
 
 There could be no doubt about it now. It was Julie ! Julie the 
 
A PRETTY HORSE-BREAKER. 115 
 
 -'emure, reared in a convent, and nurtured amid the woods of 
 Bratton, metamorphized into a pretty horse-breaker ! 
 
 Herbert didn't know for a moment whether he were more 
 shocked or surprised. 
 
 He had heard from the little mother that Julie had left quite 
 suddenly. This much she told him ; not, perhaps, without a scorn- 
 ful word or two about the manoeuvring little gouvernante, being 
 only a woman ; but she said nothing about the cruel rumours that 
 were whispered in Bidef ord, and spoken of openly at Bratton, that 
 Julie had followed him to Cambridge. 
 
 Lady Millicent had taxed her with it, and with keeping her there 
 till too late in the night for any decent girl to be abroad, and 
 sending her back through the dusky woods with that hot-headed, 
 impertinent undergraduate. It was all Lucy's fault. At least, her 
 adyship, with delightful delicacy, told her so. 
 
 It always is the mother's fault when boys go wrong. Oh, fond, 
 v'oolish mother, if your darling goes wrong, always remember, as 
 you bend over his cradle, as you weep over his bier, that yon have 
 no one to thank but yourself ! At least, the world says so. But 
 if he succeeds ? Oh, that is quite another thing ! 
 
 Lucy bore Lady Millicent's reproof meekly. She had faith in 
 her boy ; she would believe no evil of him. She could not gainsay 
 the girl's flight, and happening, by a strange coincidence, on the 
 same morning as his departure. 
 
 Then there was that dreadful, incontrovertible fact, that Julie 
 had gone to Cambridge. So far she had been traced. 
 
 Still, whoever was guilty, Herbert was innocent. He was too 
 honourable, Lucy told herself, too innately manly and noble, to 
 mislead a poor, vain, weak creature, wilfully bent on its own 
 destruction ; and he was but a mere boy — he could not possibly 
 Marry her ! 
 
 Lucy comforted herself with these reflections, and she put them 
 modestly to Lady Millicent. She had her own private opinion 
 about the misdoing that had been going on at Bratton through the 
 oleasant idle days of the long vacation, and the misdoer, but she 
 iept it discreetly to herself. 
 
 There was only one convincing argument that Lucy could bring 
 to bear upon her ladyship. Herbert had no money. The two 
 iittle golden coins that he changed at the railway-station for his 
 third-class ticket would not pay Julie's travelling expenses, and the 
 little slut had no money of her own. 
 
 Lady Millicent listened to these statements with polite incre- 
 dulity. She was very sorry for Lucy ; she was sorry, too, in her 
 lofty, indifferent way for the f oolish boy who had been misled by 
 the wily little gouvernante' s meretricious charms. 
 
 But for the girl herself, she had sinned too deeply to be forgiven. 
 Language altogether failed to express her ladyship's just wrath 
 with the ungrateful dependent who had flung her gifts in her face, 
 
 8—2 
 
u6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 with the impertinent jade who had crowned that awful heap of 
 faded finery with worn-out slippers and rouge-pots — empty ones. 
 
 No ; Julie's name was never again to be mentioned at Bratton. 
 A perfectly capable and strong-minded successor was appointed to 
 rule over the amiable children in the schoolroom, and poor little 
 Lucy was summarily dismissed. 
 
 Lucy bore her dismissal meekly ; she hadn't the spirit of a mouse, 
 but she never reflected for one moment upon her boy. She told 
 him no more than that a new governess had been engaged at the 
 great house, and that her services were no longer required. 
 
 The foolish fellow was very glad to hear it. He never thought 
 how that little household at Bideford would go on without the 
 guineas Lucy so hardly earned. He never considered where the 
 money was to come from to meet those outside expenses of his 
 University education, which, like a snowball, grew with the 
 terms. 
 
 The simple fellow was foolishly elated that the dear little 
 mother's teaching was at an end. He was going to do great things 
 by-and-by ; he was going to win some of the great prizes of life 
 and lay them at her dear feet. 
 
 Had he not by way of earnest won some college prizes already, 
 which she kept in a glazed book-case that had once belonged to the 
 old coach, in the best parlour at home ? 
 
 She was never to work any more ; she was never to be anxious, 
 or worried, or distressed by sordid cares, and all those nasty mean 
 worries that leave their cruel lines on the noblest faces. Sh« 
 should have a life of ease, and culture, and repose, by-and-by ; a 
 gentle life, full of graceful charities, and crowned with the 
 tenderest love ! And meanwhile — while the grass grew ? 
 
 Well, Lucy was not the only mother whose sons have been going 
 to do great things for her by-and-by. They meant it in their 
 hearts, dear fellows, though the time should never come, or, 
 coming, the dear life should have passed beyond the reach of their 
 love and care ! 
 
 Herbert said nothing in his letters to Bideford about the dis- 
 covery he had made. It was not his part to betray the foolish little 
 moth that had wilfully flown into the candle. She had made her 
 own bed, and no doubt the result would be as satisfactory as such 
 bed making generally is. 
 
 He saw a good deal of Julie now. A day seldom passed but her 
 high-stepping horses might be seen in the street with that ridicu- 
 lous little groom grinning behind. And at every public event the 
 magnificence of her toilettes astonished all beholders. Spurway 
 was never to be seen in ' madam's ' company ; but Grinley was 
 often with her, and his escort or his never-failing key, unlocked 
 doors for her that were virtuously closed against females of doubt- 
 ful antecedents. 
 
 Herbert heard her voice in Spurway's room one day when Jayne 
 
A PRETTY HORSE-BREAKER. 117 
 
 and a friend, who had come over from Emmanuel, were drinking tea 
 iu his room. 
 
 It didn't exactly make his hair stand on end, but he flushed quite 
 crimson, and got up and shut the outer door. 
 
 Julie was singing one of her delightful little French songs — a 
 shrill, piercing thing, that even sounded through the oak. It was 
 quite proper — she used to sing it to the children at Bratton — but it 
 made him shiver all over. 
 
 Suppose she were to come in and sing it in his room ? She was 
 quite likely to ; his name was over the door, and Julie was not 
 troubled with scruples. 
 
 Jayne had brought in his coadjutor in Barnwell, an Emmanuel 
 man, hailing from the States, who, in addition to working hard for 
 his Tripos, was the best forward in the 'Varsity at football, and the 
 coach of his college boat; — a brawny giant of the true American 
 type ; self-contained, and sparing of words, but with a twinkle in 
 his steel-blue eyes that showed, with all their shrewdness, that he 
 was not deficient in the national Yankee humour. 
 
 John Harvard had a reputation for work ; but whether it were 
 from natural modesty or some less amiable weakness, he chose to 
 disguise his activity by an assumption of indolence, propping him- 
 self up, when talking, against walls, with his head lolling idly and 
 his great hands in his pockets. He seemed to have been born tired. 
 He was an American by birth, a descendant of the old Pilgrim 
 Fathers — a lineal descendant, indeed, of the old Puritan, John 
 Harvard, who had gone out from Cambridge in the Mayflower, and 
 left his name behind him in another Cambridge — in a newer 
 England. 
 
 They have put up a window to him at his college — Emmanuel — 
 in the old Cambridge (and a very good window it is, with the May- 
 flower spreading her sails in the background), and a more enduring 
 memorial, in brick and stone, in the new Cambridge. 
 
 John Harvard's latest descendant, who had already graduated at 
 the University that bore his name, had come over to take a degree 
 at the older University. He claimed a scholarship at Emmanuel by 
 right of his descent ; and he was not treading unworthily in those 
 firm footsteps that have left such a deep impression on the shifting 
 sands of two worlds. 
 
 With Julie's French song in his ears, John Harvard was lolling 
 against the wall, and arranging a plan of campaign with Jayne for 
 their winter's work in Barnwell. 
 
 While they were talking, the chapel bell began to ring, and Jayne 
 limped over to the door. It took him a long time to cross the 
 Great Court. Harvard slouched out after him, in his awkward 
 fashion ; and the moment they got on the landing, the opposite 
 door opened, and Julie came out. 
 
 Her face was radiant, and her dress was radiant ; and she was 
 such a perfectly delightful and unexpected vision on that dingy 
 
Il8 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 staircase, that Jayne involuntarily stepped back. He had a ridi- 
 culous habit of getting out of everybody's way, and he stepped back 
 to let her pass. 
 
 But Julie had no intention of passing. There were two in- 
 genuous undergraduates in the doorway, and another flying down 
 from the upper flight of stairs in his surplice. Julie passed 
 through them with a little cry of recognition ; she didn't exactly 
 throw herself on Herbert's bosom, but she held out her beautifully- 
 gloved hand to him before them all ; and he took it. 
 
 The men went down the stairs gravely, and the chapel bell went 
 on ringing ; and Herbert found himself talking to the little 
 governess as he had talked to her in his mother's parlour at Bide- 
 ford. 
 
 Spurway passed down the stairs with his friends. 
 
 ' You know your way out ?' he called up to her as he went 
 down. 
 
 * Yes,' she cried gaily over the banisters ; ' my fiacre and my 
 tigre are waiting.' 
 
 She followed Herbert into his room, and talked to him about 
 Bratton and his mother. He winced involuntarily to hear that 
 .acred name spoken by such light lips, but he soon got used to it. 
 She praised his room, his pictures, his books, his chairs, the faded 
 flowers in his windows, a superannuated fern in a pot on his table, 
 his harlequin tea-service, and the little silver teapot that she 
 remembered at Bideford. 
 
 The chapel bell stopped ringing, and he hung his surplice up 
 with a sigh. When the men came in from chapel, she was still 
 there ; and Jayne, who had put his head in at the door, shut it in 
 has*"e when he recognised Herbert's visitor, and limped upstairs to 
 his garret quicker than he had ever limped up before. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 tommy's little brother. 
 
 * And caught once more the distant shoxit, 
 The measured pulse of racing oars. ' 
 
 If not the gayest term in the University year, with its shortening 
 days, and the dripping fen fogs closing in, October term is not 
 lacking in pleasant devices for passing the time. 
 
 For those who do not play football, or ride bicycles, or wear out 
 their boots on the Grantchester ' grind,' there is always the river. 
 
 If one doesn't handle the oar, there is better fun to be got, 
 without the risk of misadventure, by looking on. 
 
 The Freshmen's Trial Eights and sculling races made the river 
 lively ; and Herbert, try as he would, couldn't keep away from the 
 bank. It was so cold on the bank that he easily persuaded himself 
 
TOMMY'S LITTLE BROTHER. 119 
 
 that he should be better off on the river ; and so, without intend- 
 ing it, he fonnd himself once more in his college eight. Geraint's 
 shoulder was all right again, and he, too, had taken his old place 
 in the boat. 
 
 In spite of the cold winds and the sleet, there was a fair sprink- 
 ling of ladies on the bank during the short winter afternoons when 
 the men were practising, the Belles of Cambridge among them ; 
 perhaps it would be more accurate to say the Belle, as the elder 
 Miss Bellenden's beauty was decidedly on the wane by daylight. 
 A discreet arrangement of Bloom-de-Ninon and other gentle aids to 
 Nature, veiled from the too ardent gaze of Apollo and the crucial 
 daylight by a gossamer of a becoming tint, still secured for Miss 
 Bellenden the easy admiration of impressionable undergraduates. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden required no such fictitious aids ai present, 
 though her lovely colour was a trifle fixed. She still ruled by 
 right divine the Belle of Cambridge. 
 
 The cold winds brought fresh roses to her cheeks in addition to 
 the stationary ones, and the sun lent a gleam of its own to the pale 
 gold of her hair ; and the lovely whiteness and softness of her 
 complexion were never more lovely than when relieved by the rich 
 velvet and sables of her outdoor toilette. At least Geraint thought 
 so, as, regardless of the ballyragging giant on the bank who coached 
 the Second Trinity, he allowed his attention to be distracted by 
 Hebe Bellenden's charms. 
 
 Grinley met the sisters Bellenden by the ferry, and, as the boats 
 passed, Herbert saw him walking between them with a cool defiant 
 air of ownership that sent all the blood into Geraint's face and 
 neck as he jumped recklessly out of the boat, and he was quite red 
 enough from his exertion before. 
 
 Herbert didn't like the look of matters, and he told Geraint so 
 with a curious mixture of diffidence and boldness as they crossed 
 Midsummer Common in one of the sudden fogs that close in the late 
 autumn days on the river. 
 
 1 1 am going to say something very disagreeable, old fellow,' he 
 said by way of beginning. ' I'm going to make a beast of myself.' 
 
 ' All right ; fire away !' was Geraint's encouraging reply. 
 
 The wind was sweeping up from the marshes, and the mists were 
 solemnly rising over the river, and there was a silence between 
 them for a little while. Geraint was so much older than Herbert, 
 and not a man of his standing, and he hesitated before availing 
 himself of his permission to ' fire away.' 
 
 ' I have been thinking,' he began diffidently, • while we have been 
 in the boat, and while I have seen her on the bank,' he didn't say 
 nho, ' that — that this engagement of yours may lead to very 
 miserable things.' 
 
 1 It will lead to the most miserable things,' Geraint said, speaking 
 thickly out of the fog ; 'but whatever it leads to will not influence 
 me.' 
 
i2o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' You — you cannot give her up ?' 
 
 The fog made Herbert bold ; he could not see the other's face. 
 ' I would not give her up if I could.' 
 
 ' Oh, Geraint ! Think of your father ; of —of the girl you ara 
 engaged to !' 
 
 ' I have thought of them,' said Geraint calmly. ' I have counted 
 the exact cost, and if it were ten thousand times more than it is, I 
 would not give Eebe Bellenden up.' 
 1 You think so now.' 
 ' I shall always think so !' 
 
 There was no more said about it during their walk home through 
 the fog. 
 
 Geraint went to see Hebe Bellenden after Hall. There was 
 seldom a night passed but he went to that secluded house at 
 Chesterton. When he was not there his spirit haunted it. When 
 he was wining with his friends, or losing heavily at cards — he 
 always lost — or smokiDg at the Pitt, or listening to windy debates 
 at the Union — wherever his body happened to be his spirit was 
 always wandering about that house of doubtful reputation. 
 
 But his body as well as his spirit was there to-night. He called 
 Herbert into his rooms before he went. He wore his gown over 
 his dress-suit, and a flower in his button-hole. He was standing 
 beside a table trifling nervously with a book that lay open before 
 him. 
 
 ' You have acted a friend's part to me, Flowers,' he began, still 
 turning the pages, ' and I am going to trust you. I am going to 
 show you the face of the woman I am engaged to marry — the woman 
 whose life I am spoiling.' 
 
 He turned the page of the album as he spoke, and the face of 
 Mary Barclay confronted him — a strikingly beautiful face, clear- 
 cut, well-defined features, a firm yet flexible mouth, and perfectly 
 straightforward and candid eyes. The face was not smiling ; it 
 was a trifle cold and calm and self-possessed, but it impressed one 
 with a sense of suppressed feeling. There was nothing artificial 
 in it. 
 
 Herbert shivered as he stood silently contemplating the beautiful 
 face before him. It was so unlike the other. 
 ' It is a noble face !' he said presently. 
 
 ' She is a noble woman !' Geraint said, involuntarily closing the 
 book with a spring, ' and — and I am a scoundrel !' 
 
 'And she loves you ?' Herbert asked under his breath. 
 He spoke of it as such a sacred thing ; he was only a boy still, 
 and the only woman's love he had ever known was the love of the 
 little mother. 
 
 ' Yes, she loves me. She has been engaged to me all her life. 
 We were brought up together. My individuality has long been 
 merged in hers. I am known as Mary's husband.' 
 ' Oh, Geraint, how will she bear it r 
 
TOMMY'S LITTLE BROTHER. 121 
 
 The colour left Geraint's face, and lie turned away to light a 
 cigar, and threw the match in the grate. He stood before the fire 
 for some moments looking at the face that confronted him on the 
 mantelpiece — the lovely face that was luring him to destruction. 
 A terrible impulse seized Herbert to take the fair false thing from 
 its pedestal and fling it into the midst of the flames that roared up 
 the college chimney. 
 
 Perhaps Geraint read some such intention in his eyes as he 
 glanced gloomily up at the photograph that was smiling down upon 
 him. Herbert restrained himself, and put his hands in his pockets 
 instead. 
 
 ' No,' he said slowly, puffing the smoke out between his lips as 
 he spoke, with apparent tranquillity ; 'there is no comparison to 
 be made between them, Flowers. Mary Barclay is worth a 
 thousand of her — and — she has a million of money. I am not 
 fitted to be a poor man ; I have extravagant tastes, and I know 
 exactly the value of money. But, in spite of all this, Mary Barclay 
 will have to go to the wall.' 
 
 He sat smoking quite calmly as he said this, inspecting the ash 
 of the tobacco and the texture of the cigar, as if his judgment were 
 a matter of importance. 
 
 ' How will you break it to her ?' 
 
 ' I shall never break it to her. "When I am married to Hebe ' — 
 here his face flushed scarlet in the firelight — ' she will know it, not 
 till then. She has the noblest heart in the world, and this will 
 break it.' 
 
 He rose as he spoke and took up his cap, sauntering carelessly to 
 the door like one walking in a dream, stopping now and then to 
 look at the prints on the wall as if he had never seen them before. 
 Something in his attitude recalled to Herbert the man who had 
 followed Hebe in that dazed, stricken way, on that memorable 
 night, out of the room, and the whole scene rose up before him. 
 
 1 For God's sake, Geraint,' he said, following him to the door and 
 detaining him — 'for God's sake, pause, before it is too late!' 
 
 ' It is too late now,' he answered bitterly, with a gloomy smile. 
 He paused at the door with a mirthless laugh. ' And if it were 
 not,' he said, ' if she released me to-night, I should crawl back to- 
 morrow like a beaten hound, and lay my life, my very soul, at her 
 feet.' 
 
 He went ont into the night, and Herbert stood in the doorway 
 looking after him. He looked so handsome, and frank, and manly, 
 as he stood in the lamplight making this terrible confession, that 
 Herbert sighed involuntarily, thinking of his ruined life, his 
 blighted prospects. 
 
 It was Herbert's first night in Barnwell, and while Geraint went 
 his -wilful way, Herbert and Jayne groped theirs through the fog 
 to Emmanuel, where they found Harvard awaiting them. They 
 lost each other several times on Parker's Piece, and arrived in Barn- 
 
122 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 well jnst as all the mothers had, with quite wonderful unanimity, 
 come to fetch all the children. 
 
 ' Bless you,' said one mother, with a shawl over her head and a 
 bundle in her arms ; they all had shawls over their heads, and 
 most of them had bundles in their arms — ' bless you, if I weren't 
 to fetch Tommy, he'd lose hisself in the fog, and lead us a pretty 
 dance all night. He never do lose a chance of losing hisself, 
 Tommy don't !' 
 
 It was too late to begin work, for the children were tired and 
 sleepy ; but the chance was too good a one to be lost. 
 
 They could get Tommy any day, but Tommy's mother waa 
 quite a different thing. 
 
 ' Let us have a hymn, at any rate, before they go,' Jayne 
 pleaded. 
 
 The children were thronging to the door, but Harvard, coming 
 in last, got himself between it and them. It was his favourite 
 position. He was never more at home than when propping himself 
 up against a door, and with his hands in his pockets. 
 
 He took them out now — they were great muscular hands that 
 could twist a bar of iron into a corkscrew— and he was tenderly un- 
 wrapping the little pink bundle in the arms of the woman nearest 
 the door. 
 
 ' All right, old man,' he said, in that clear ringing voice of his 
 jhat was audible all over the room ; 'just wait a minute. I want 
 Jo see " Tommy's little brother." ' 
 
 ' Now, here's a wonderful thing : he's made friends with me 
 already ; see !' and he held up his great strong hand with the 
 feeble pink fist clinging to it. ' Who'd have thought that the little 
 chap knew that I was a friend ? I don't believe any man in the 
 dark would have put out his hand to me, and clung to me in this 
 way. See, he's hanging on still ! What a plucky little chap ! he 
 hasn't a bit of fear in him. Now, if I wanted a text for a sermon, 
 I should choose " Tommy's little brother." ' 
 
 The women were all listening to him rapt, and the children 
 were listening too, and nobody was in a hurry to go. It would have 
 been all the same if they had been, with that great, burly giant of 
 an Emmanuel man propping himself up against the door, with his 
 head rolling idly, as if seeking for a convenient resting-place. 
 
 And there, in his easy, familiar way, with the little pink fist 
 pointing the moral of his sermon, he addressed the mothers of Barn- 
 well on the duties and responsibilities of their position. He 
 wound up his brief address by reminding them of the words of a 
 wise man — the wisest of all times : ' Train up a child in the way 
 he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' ' Now,' 
 he said, ' you train up Tommy's little brother in the right way, and 
 when he's a man grown — a great big, strong fellow, I take it he'll 
 be, and one of the right sort — he'll have his fling, maybe, and eat 
 the husks, as we all have to do if we follow our own inclinations ; 
 
TOMMY'S LITTLE BROTHER. 123 
 
 but he'll come back to the right way in the end. He's got a soft 
 place in his heart, like the rest of us — a very soft place, I should 
 say, by the look of him — and he'll never forget the prayers he used to 
 say at his mother's knee, the hymns he used to sing round the hearth 
 at home, the sound of the church bells that rang in his ears when 
 he walked by his mother's side to church in the days of his innocent 
 childhood. Do you think a man ever forgets these things ? I tell 
 you some men, when they are dying — men who have led wild reck- 
 less lives — look up suddenly, just at the end, and declare to those 
 who are standing by that they hear the old church bells they 
 heard in their childhood ringing in their ears, and they are calling 
 them, as they called them of old, into the presence of God. 
 
 ' Depend upon it, there is no act of yours now, no tender precepts, 
 no gentle example, that will be lost upon your children. When you 
 are gone, and they are scattered about in the world, and your 
 little home is broken up, don't you think that your children 
 will have forgotten you. They are never likely to forget you. 
 Some day they 'will get memorials of you, and divide them among 
 themselves to adorn their humble homes. 
 
 ' One will have your Bible ; another the rough wooden table, 
 round which you all used to kneel — the family altar ; another 
 will have the poor cheap likeness of your dear face — how inex- 
 pressibly dear you will never know. 
 
 1 Depend upon it, they will never forget your face. However 
 plain and coarse and common it may be, it is the most beautiful 
 face in the world to them, and so with your example. 
 
 ' " It must be right," they will say, "because my mother did it f 
 and if they have loved you so much, will they not quite naturally 
 look forward to meeting you again as the dearest hope and 
 comfort of their lives ? To have a mother in heaven before us, 
 anticipating our coming there, as she once used to anticipate it 
 here, makes it very real and near to us. 
 
 ' Thank God I have one there myself !' and the strong man bent 
 down over the little pink fist for a moment, and Tommy's mother 
 remarked that it was wet and shining when he looked up again. 
 
 'The parting from them, whenever it comes, and it must come 
 some day to us all, will have lost its sting if you have lived to- 
 gether here in the fear and love of God. You will have this 
 abiding comfort, that you will meet them all again some day. God 
 will bring their wandering feet home, every one of them. All the 
 sad faces, all the tired footsteps, whether of parents or children, 
 are all pressing forward — all travelling onwards towards that home. 
 God grant you all a safe journey and a happy meeting !' 
 
 The women were all weeping, and the elder boys, who usually 
 made as much noise as they possibly could in going downstairs, 
 went down softly, and made way for the little ones. Herbert 
 stopped at the door, and bent over the little pink bundle in the 
 woman's arms. 
 
[24 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' G-od bless Tommy's little brother,' he said huskily, 'for giving us 
 so good a text !' 
 
 It might have been the fog that had got down his throat, for he 
 had to clear it a good many times as he crossed Parker's Piece with 
 Jayne limping by his side. 
 
 ' Dear me,' said Jayne presently, pausing for breath, ' we forgot 
 e 11 about the hymn ! You ought to have given out a hymn, 
 L ack.' 
 
 * All right, old man, it isn't too late now ; what'll you have ?' 
 Harvard called out a little in advance. 'We've been scattering a 
 1 ttle promiscuous seed to-night : shall we have " The Sower " ?' 
 
 The fog was so dense that they could not see his burly figure, 
 but they could hear his cheery voice stirring'all the sodden, broken- 
 spirited echoes around Parker's Piece — 'The sower went forth 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 MADAM JEZEBEL. 
 
 * Learned to work the wary dogcart 
 Artf ully through King's Parade. ' 
 
 Herbert saw more of Julie in those closing days of the term 
 than he cared to see. She found her way much too often up that 
 dingy staircase, and shocked the austere proprieties of the college 
 by keeping her dogcart and her tiger for hours driving up and 
 down before the gate of Trinity. 
 
 It didn't matter to Spurway and his friends, who drank wine and 
 smoked and lounged about his rooms during the wet winter after- 
 noons, while Julie sang little French songs. They amused 
 themselves in their way, and had no reputations to lose. But 
 to Herbert these visits of Julie meant very different things. 
 His scholarship and his blameless life were the whole of his 
 capital. He had no other resources to fall back upon. There 
 were his musty old classics and the old coach's silver inkstand. 
 But that was in Spurway's room ; he had forgotten to return it, 
 and Herbert was too modest to remind him of it. 
 
 He sported his oak, like St. Anthony did, no doubt, if there 
 happened to have been one to his cell, whenever he heard that 
 footstep on his stairs. But it was all of no use ; Julie had the 
 sharpest ears in the world, and whenever Herbert's door opened to 
 let out a friend, admitted by some preconcerted signal, Julie, by a 
 most curious coincidence, would open the door opposite, and would 
 run across the landing and have a word with the hermit. 
 
 This was generally just before chapel, and the giddy little thing 
 would fluttsr about his room until he took down his surplice, and 
 modestly terminated her visit by leaving her in possession and 
 hurrying down the stairs. 
 
MADAM JEZEBEL. 125 
 
 This was not always effectual. More than once she tripped 
 down the stairs after him, and bade him adieu in the quad, with 
 the Dons hurrying by in their surplices. 
 
 It was after one of these visits that Herbert received a summons 
 from his tutor. He had long waited for an opportunity of putting 
 Brown's case before him. Mr. Routh was a trifle hard, and dis- 
 tinctly unapproachable, and he had watched and waited for some 
 fitting occasion, a softening moment, which even college tutors are 
 liable to, for pleading Brown's cause. 
 
 He seized his cap and gown, and, armed with Brown's letter, 
 hurried across the quad. Mr. Routh was specially interested in 
 Herbert's work ; he had playfully spoken of him, indeed, as a 
 budding senior classic, and occasionally sent for him to talk it over 
 with him. Herbert had no cause for trepidation as he climbed that 
 familiar staircase, three steps at a time : his heart, except from 
 the exertion, beat as quietly as if he were going to his own rooms. 
 He had never yet received a reproof from those hard lips for failure 
 or neglect. 
 
 In happy confidence he presented himself in the tutor's room. 
 
 Mr. Routh's adamantine countenance was a trifle harder and 
 colder than usual. 
 
 He didn't ask Herbert to sit down, and he rose up from his own 
 seat, and covered the fireplace with his back, and kept all the 
 warmth of the fire from him, as he stood diffidently, cap in hand, 
 on the edge of the rug. 
 
 'I have sent for you, Mr. Flowers,' he began stiffly, ' to request 
 you to beg the — er — female who, I am told, comes to your rooms 
 very frequently, to — er — discontinue her visits.' 
 
 Herbert turned as red as he had ever done in the earliest days of 
 his blushes, and his voice faltered, and the room seemed to be going 
 round with him. 
 
 ' Yes, sir,' he said ; and that was all he could say. 
 
 He had had such an old-fashioned training in honour, that he 
 could not, to establish his own innocence, betray another. 
 
 ' I am very sorry to have occasion to speak to you on such a 
 subject ;' and the tutor's pale face flushed, and he looked at Herbert 
 steadily. ' And, I must own, I am disappointed in you, Mr. 
 Flowers !' 
 
 The tears were smarting in Herbert's eyes, and he was silent, 
 looking down at the pattern of the worn Turkey rug. 
 
 The tutor took this for an admission of guilt, and his shaggy 
 eyebrows knitted fiercely. 
 
 ' You are not a freshman,' he said severely, scrutinizing Herbert's 
 look and manner, which were certainly more guilty than defiant. 
 ' You have not that excuse for setting the rules of the college at 
 defiance, and as a scholar you have set an example of open- 
 and shameless immorality, which will meet with the reproof it de 
 serves when it is brought before the college authorities.' 
 
126 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' I beg your pardon, sir,' said Herbert modestly. He wasn't 
 thinking of his own shame, but of his little mother at home. ' But 
 you are judging me unjustly. I — I have no relations whatever to 
 be ashamed of with the lady you saw leaving my rooms. I knew 
 her as a child at Bideford. She was my mother's visitor.' 
 
 What else could he say more in attestation of Julie's respect- 
 ability ? 
 
 ' Whatever your previous connection may have been with her,' 
 said the tutor icily, with a curl about the corners of his mouth, 
 ' she is not the sort of visitor for undergraduates' rooms. If she 
 attempts to enter the college again, the matter will be in the hands 
 of the Proctors. G ood-morning, Mr. Flowers !' 
 
 And, so dismissed, Herbert turned away. There was a singing 
 in his ears, and his eyes were smarting, and he didn't go downstairs 
 three at a time. He remembered, as he crossed the quad, a little 
 story that Julie had told him of her right to the name she bore — 
 Madam Spurway ; but it had never occurred to him to justify her 
 visits to his staircase as the wife of his neighbour, Tom Spurway. 
 
 Julie had a talent for romancing, and this story was, no doubt, 
 a creation of her fertile imagination. At any rate, he said nothing 
 to his tutor about it. 
 
 He was in a very savage mood when he reached his own stair- 
 case. Spurway was coming blandly across the landing to borrow 
 something, but he cut him dead, and slammed his oak in his face. 
 
 Casting his cap and gown off fiercely — breaking the only sound 
 corner of his cap — he flung himself on the couch — the leg had been 
 mended — and buried his face in his hands. 
 
 Jayne, who had been sitting in the big armchair by the fire, 
 jumped up at once, as quickly as his infirmity would let him. 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' he said, ' what's the matter ? Has anything 
 happened, Flowers ? That Madam Jezebel — I beg her pardon — 
 has been here, and I've sent her away. I hope it isn't that ?' 
 
 Poor Jayne was trembling all over, and his honest face wore a 
 look of deep concern. 
 
 4 No,' Herbert groaned from the couch ; 'it isn't that. I'm much 
 obliged to you for doing it.' 
 
 ' I'm very sorry I came in,' said Jayne ; ' if I'm in the way •' 
 
 4 You are not in the way !' Herbert interrupted impatiently. * I 
 think you were sent here on purpose to — to help me out of it. I 
 begin to see a purpose in things now.' 
 
 4 Now, really ; do you ?' said Jayne, with his kind face beaming. 
 'If it'll relieve you to tell me all about it, whatever it is that has 
 upset you, I'm sure I'll do what I can to help you.' 
 
 And so, with his hot face buried in the cushion of his couch, 
 Herbert poured out the cruel story of the tutor's injustice and sus- 
 picion. 
 
 ' And I could not clear myself !' Herbert moaned disconsolately. 
 
 1 No, of course you couldn't !' said Jayne cheerfully. * It isn't 
 
MADAM JEZEBEL. 127 
 
 often one gets a chance of suffering for anybody else. I don't 
 think, under any circumstances, that you would be justified in 
 — in explaining matters. It is better to suffer for well-doing 
 than for evil-doing, Flowers. But I think Spurway ought to 
 explain.' 
 
 ' I shall never tell him,' said Herbert bitterly. 
 
 'But I shall,' said Jayne ; 'and I shall tell him to keep that 
 Madam Jezebel away. I'd have nothing more to do with the 
 matter if I were you, Flowers. One cannot touch pitch without 
 being defiled.' 
 
 Jayne was as good as his word,, and Herbert heard him limping 
 over to Spurway's door when he went out. 
 
 The warning had the desired effect, and Julie came no more to 
 Herbert's rooms. 
 
 Spurway did not explain, and when he met Herbert on the stairs 
 or in the quad he slunk away from the scornful reproach in the 
 boy's honest eyes like a whipped hound. 
 
 There was a decided coldness in the attitude of all the college 
 dignitaries to Herbert after this episode. The Master rustled by 
 in his silk gown, and his noble face never relaxed into a smile as he 
 coldly acknowledged Herbert's greeting, and Mrs. Howell never 
 stopped to ask after the little mother now ; and the Trinity Lily 
 looked straight over his head when she passed him in the quad, and 
 once, when he met her clear eyes in the chapel when he was making 
 his humble confession on his knees (he had no business to be 
 looking that way ; he was not making his confession to her), he read 
 there quite as plainly as if she had spoken the words : 
 
 ' I am disappointed in you, Herbert Flowers !' 
 
 It was in everybody's eyes, if not on their tongues. The tutor's 
 severe frown had not relaxed, the urbane Proctors looked sus- 
 picious, and the Dean's kind eyes had a world of grave reproof in 
 them that cut Herbert to the quick more than words. 
 
 He bore the reproach and shame in silence, but he sent his bed- 
 maker across the landing for his silver inkstand. He would have 
 no more communication with the hopeful scion of the house of 
 Spurway, in whose case certainly noblesse did not oblige. 
 
 Geraint was furious ; Jayne had told him, and begged him to use 
 his influence with Spurway to 'own up' and make a clean breast 
 of it. 
 
 'It's the most caddish thing I ever heard,' said Geraint hotly. 
 'By Jove, he ought to be cut! If there's any more stir made 
 about it, I shall lay the whole business before the principals. If 
 that Madam Jezebel is really his wife, he ought to say so, and not 
 drag the reputations of honest men and women in the dust by 
 getting mixed up with her.' 
 
 He was thinking of Hebe, not of Herbert, just then. He met 
 her and Spurway at the Bellendens' a few nights after this ex- 
 plosion, and cut tb?m in such a marked manner that Miss Bellenden 
 
r28 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 requested him not to come there again until he could treat her 
 guests with more consideration. 
 
 Julie took it into her foolish little head that Herbert was the 
 cause of her being turned out of Trinity. The delightful visits to 
 Spurway's rooms were at an end. She could no longer bewilder the 
 eyes of ingenuous undergraduates in the quad, as she passed 
 through it, like Solomon in all his glory, or ogle them on the stair- 
 case ; and her tiger wag warned off parading that smart dogcart 
 before the gate of Trinity. 
 
 It was all Herbert's fault I and in a delightful, ill- written, spite- 
 ful letter, she told him so, and added a threat to make him rue it 
 when the opportunity presented itself. 
 
 He put down the letter with a smile. And he had once thought 
 that he loved this woman ! 
 
 Well, his standard of female excellence had changed. All 
 standards change. The illusion, like other illusions, was quite 
 gone. She was ever so much handsomer than in the old days, in 
 the mother's little parlour at Bideford, but she was not the same, 
 somehow. The light had gone quite out of her eyes for him (the 
 men who used to meet her in the quad said they were so bright that 
 you could light a cigar at them, but they didn't shine for him). In 
 vain she tossed her pretty head, or displayed her most bewildering 
 graces. Herbert had long since ceased to be bewildered by such 
 tinsel. He knew the right thing now when he saw it — and he saw 
 it pretty often in the college chapel. 
 
 It might as well have been up in heaven as down there in the 
 stalls of Trinity, under the organ-loft, for what it could ever be to 
 him. He had learnt at least one lesson from it, that it was quite 
 well to learn early in life, if it only brought cold comfort in the 
 end. 
 
 He was ashamed, and humiliated, and very sad, but he had quite 
 realized, looking across the hymns in chapel at that divinity singing 
 somewhere between earth and heaven, that one must needs love the 
 highest. 
 
 There was nothing more said about bringing Herbert's flagrant 
 immorality before the college authorities. The Dons glowered at 
 him with unaccustomed severity ; but perhaps a doubt had risen in 
 their superior minds as to the real offender, and their awful dis- 
 pleasure took no other outward and visible form. 
 
 But this was not Herbert's only source of uneasiness. With all 
 his care and economy, his debts had increased instead of diminished 
 during the term. 
 
 There was that wretched dress-suit, crumpled up at the bottom 
 of his drawers, that he hated to look upon, and his boating flannels 
 and blazers, and that new suit he wore with such becoming modesty 
 at the Senate-house when he recited his prize poem before the 
 Vice-Chancellor. He had to go to a separate tailor for each of 
 these items, to satisfy the scruples of his tutor, who had a whim, in 
 
MADAM JEZEBEL. 129 
 
 common with other University tutors, that no undergraduate should 
 incur a liability exceeding the sum of five pounds without that in- 
 teresting fact being brought to his knowledge. So Herbert had a 
 three-barrelled tailor's bill running at once, and they all, with singu- 
 lar unanimity, presented their accounts at the same moment. 
 
 Other Cambridge tradesmen took the advantage of the end of the 
 term to present theirs, and Herbert had quite a flutter of wings 
 around his glass to greet him whenever he stirred his fire. There 
 were none round Jayne's glass ; but then, as he explained, he never 
 bought anything that he had not the money in his pocket to pay 
 for, and never, under any circumstances, anything that he could do 
 without. 
 
 Herbert groaned, and when he was gone stuffed them all into a 
 drawer of his writing-table, and turned the key with a great deal of 
 unnecessary vehemence. 
 
 He didn't go down to Bideford that vacation. He had no heart 
 to face the little mother with that skeleton rattling its dry bones 
 in the cupboard — at least, in the drawer he had so carefully locked. 
 So he went down with Jayne to spend the Christmas with his 
 people at Lynn. 
 
 Geraint came in the night before they went down. His gyp was 
 packing his things ; his interview with his tutor was over — in which 
 Mr. Ho nth had taken the opportunity of making a few grave and 
 appropriate remarks on the unprofitable result of his last year's 
 pursuit — and he had come in to say a few last words to Herbert 
 before going down. He had altered his plans at the last moment. 
 ' I say, I'm not going to Rome, after all, Flowers,' he began. 
 ' Well,' said Herbert, ' what's up ?' 
 
 ' Oh, I'm going home instead ;' and a faint colour suffused his 
 face. ' Fact is,' he said frankly, ' it's Christmas time, and I've 
 never spent a Christmas away from my people before ; and — and — 
 I have an impression I shall never spend a Christmas with them 
 again.' 
 
 Something choked in his throat as he spoke, and both were silent 
 for a few minutes. 
 
 'You know I'm awfully superstitious,' Geraint began, puffing 
 away furiously at the cigar he was smoking ; ' I've always been so 
 — it's in the family — a weak version of second-sight. I always 
 knew, when I was a boy at school, when I was going to have an 
 accident at football. I knew beforehand just exactly as if it had 
 happened. I used to tell the other fellows, and it always came 
 true. I broke my arm once in my sleep, and I broke it again the 
 next day in the field in exactly the same place.' 
 
 ' Mere coincidence,' said Herbert shortly ; some such uncomfort- 
 able feeling had been pursuing him lately. 
 
 It was the first Christmas that he had ever spent away from 
 that humble home. 
 
 ' It's more than a coincidence,' said Geraint gravely. ' I shall 
 
 9 
 
130 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 never eat another Christmas dinner with my own people under my 
 own roof. My chair will be vacant next Christmas. They will 
 speak in hushed tones about me when they gather round the 
 hearth and burn the yule log next year. I saw it all last night, 
 and my seat was vacant, and that is why I am not going to 
 Rome.' 
 
 Herbert stirred the fire uneasily. 
 
 ' Tou will be on your wedding-tour, I suppose? 1 he said, merely 
 for the sake of saying something. 
 
 Geraint's face brightened. 
 
 ' It will be a long tour,' he said, smiling ; ' longer than most men's. 
 It will last all our lives. Shall we get tired of each other I 
 wonder ?' 
 
 He paused and looked at the fire. It was burning hollow, and a 
 shining edifice, with gleaming towers and brilliant halls, was glow- 
 ing in Herbert's grate. 
 
 'I shall never cease to love her,' he continued, speaking confidently; 
 'but — but— she may get tired of me. It would be an awful sell 
 if she were to ! Fancy the misery of having a wife who — who 
 didn't care for you ! Fancy going through the world with a proud, 
 cold-blooded she-devil who hated you !' 
 
 The Palace Beautiful in the fire suddenly collapsed, the shining 
 walls fell in, and it lay a heap of black and smouldering ruins. 
 
 Geraint got up impatiently. 
 
 ' What a fool I am !' he said ; ' she loves me more than I deserve.' 
 
 Herbert gave a very decided grunt of disapproval. 
 
 ' Do you think that she would like you quite as well without your 
 money ? if you were a poor man and your father cut you off, as you 
 say he is very likely to do, do you think she's the sort of girl for 
 love in a cottage ?' he asked in the most disagreeable way. 
 
 ' She will never know what sacrifices I have made for her,' 
 Geraint answered in his most magnificent manner ; and, failing to 
 find sympathy from his friend, he strode off moodily to bed. 
 
 Herbert went to Lynn the following day. The third-class fare 
 was only a few shillings, so he saved the cost of that long journey 
 to Bideford. The little mother ought to have been delighted at 
 his economy, but when she got his letter she sighed as she folded 
 it up, and if the truth must be told, dropped a tear or two upon 
 it. 
 
 She had plenty of time for weeping now. The time hung so 
 heavily upon her hands now that the teaching was over. No doubt 
 it was quite right for Herbert to go away with his friend and read. 
 The place was very lonely here for him — only her dull society. He 
 was used to mixing up with other men as his equals at Cambridge, 
 but here the small gentry would hold aloof from him. He would 
 bave no honour in his own country. 
 
 But for all this Lucy was disappointed : she had counted the 
 days in her weary calendar until he should return, and by his own 
 
MADAM JEZEBEL. 131 
 
 fearless presence set at rest the cruel lying tongues that had been 
 wagging so busily about him. 
 
 They would wag more now, and with more reason, and would 
 find in his absence an additional proof of his guilt. 
 
 The heir of the great house across the Torridge was back, being 
 feted and made much of among his own people, having at last 
 quite successfully passed the Little-Go. 
 
 He was so condescending as to drop into the cottage once when 
 Lucy was taking her humble mid-day meal — in the kitchen — with 
 the little maid, and he stayed at her request to give her some 
 account of Herbert. 
 
 How greedily she gathered up all the little crumbs of informa- 
 tion about her boy ! how grateful she was for this visit, and what 
 burning coals of fire she heaped upon the head of the heir of 
 Bratton as he crept humbly and shamefaced out of her poor 
 cottage. 
 
 He sent her a brace of pheasants the very next day. She would 
 have sent them on to Herbert, but she remembered in time that it 
 might hurt the feelings of the college cook, so she ate them herself, 
 she and the little maid, rather grudgingly, but quite thankfully. 
 She hadn't the spirit of a mouse. 
 
 To do him justice, Tom Spurway represented to her ladyship the 
 obvious injustice of dismissing Herbert's mother for her son's folly 
 — always supposing it were his, of which there was no real evidence 
 — but Lady Millicent would not have the subject mentioned in her 
 presence. She had never forgiven Julie for that unfeeling exhibi- 
 tion of rouge pots. 
 
 She flew into what, with more vulgar mortals, would be called a 
 rage, and poured out such a stream of violent and by no means 
 euphonious invectives upon the ungrateful object of her charity, 
 that the son of the house left her boudoir, where he had ventured 
 upon this feeble remonstrance, with a face a trifle whiter than her 
 ladyship's morning cap. 
 
 CHAPTER XYITI. 
 
 THE DEAN'S RING. 
 
 ' . . . Nothing walks with aimless feet.' 
 
 Herbert hadn't forgotten Brown ; though so far as his mediation 
 with the authorities went, he hadn't by the end of the term found 
 an opportunity of serving him. 
 
 He came back the first day of term. There was nobody up, and 
 it was cold, raw, depressing weather. The bedmaker didn't expect 
 aim, and his rooms were in confusion, and there was no fire. He 
 va« crossing the quad in the gloom of the raw January afternoon, 
 
 9—2 
 
132 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 going on a hopeless quest to see if any other men were up, when he 
 encountered the Dean. 
 
 He capped him modestly and passed on, but the Dean turned and 
 looked after him. He had gathered his poor thin overcoat around 
 him to keep out the biting cold ; it had been a great-coat once, 
 but it had long ceased to be great in any sense. He had long out- 
 grown it, and it was utterly insufficient to keep out the cold, and 
 his tall figure looked gaunt and thin, and he had a hollow-sounding 
 racking cough that went quite to the heart of the Dean. 
 
 He called after him as he reached the gate of Trinity, and 
 Herbert turned back. 
 
 He didn't know what he expected, he was feeling so utterly cold 
 and miserable ; least of all did he expect to be taken to the Dean's 
 rooms, and warmed at the Dean's cheerful fire, and drink his tea 
 out of the Dean's old china cups and saucers. 
 
 Whatever the poor boy's sin might be — and the Dean's attitude 
 towards that form of sin that his tutor had taxed him with was 
 ■^ery severe— his sympathies were touched by his loneliness and his 
 poverty, and that nasty cold on his chest. 
 
 The best way to win a man's heart, perhaps, is to let him do you 
 a service, no matter how trifling. Put yourself under an obligation 
 to your enemy, and acknowledge it in suitable terms, and you will 
 have poured coals of fire on his head. The Samaritan had a deeper 
 interest ever after in the man he had benefited than if he had 
 passed him by on the road and given no alms or assistance to him. 
 
 The Dean talked to Herbert about his work and his occupations 
 during the vacation, and the poor boy told him that he hadn't been 
 home. He told him the simple truth — he couldn't afford the 
 journey. And then, thawing by degrees, he told him about the 
 little mother and her disappointment. The Dean sighed and 
 looked down at the ring he wore, which he turned fondly in his 
 hands while he led Herbert on to speak about his mother. 
 
 He remembered the sad story twenty years ago when Ernest 
 Flowers died, almost suddenly, on the eve of success (with just 
 such another racking cough as Herbert's), leaving a young wife and 
 an infant child. He thought he recalled that sad young face as 
 he had seen it in the college chapel. His own face beamed with 
 generous sympathy as Herbert modestly recounted the touching 
 story of Lucy's life. No lips but her boy's could tell it so tenderly ; 
 but sometimes they faltered, and his eyes grew moist. It was such 
 a monotonous story ; it had but one object, but one motive ran 
 through it — love. 
 
 When he had finished, the Dean, who had been twirling his great 
 ring about (it was no precious stone, only a bit of crystal with 
 some faded hair beneath it), said in a softened tone : 
 
 ' Some day, Flowers, I may have a story to tell you myself. I 
 hope for your sake the day will never come. I only tell it to men 
 •«?ho come to me in trouble, who have fallen or failed through their 
 
THE DEAN'S RING. 133 
 
 r wn folly or -weakness, and who come to me for help. Should that 
 day ever come, Flowers — if you should ever have'a confession to make 
 which it would help you for a fellow-man to hear — come to me, 
 and I will tell you the story of — of this In Memoriam ring I always 
 wear. It has no significance except to those in trouble.' 
 
 He was looking at Herbert very searchingly with his grave kind 
 eyes ; but he bore the scrutiny unmoved, until he suddenly_ re- 
 membered Brown, and Brown's reference to the Dean's ring. 
 Then he flushed quite scarlet in his ridiculous boyish fashion. 
 
 Was he going to make a confession now ? He was only going to 
 speak about Brown, and plead Brown's cause as well as that nasty 
 cough would allow him. The Dean promised to talk it over with 
 his tutor, and he sent Herbert back to his rooms with his own great 
 woollen comforter round his throat. 
 
 He came in later on, when Herbert had gone shivering to bed in 
 his cold sheets, with an india-rubber hot-water bottle in his hands, 
 which he made the boy put to his cold feet. And he produced from 
 his pocket-book a mysterious bit of paper, ' a little mustard-leaf,' 
 as he explained, which he applied to Herbert's chest ; and before 
 he left the room he knelt down on the little worn bit of carpet 
 beside his bed and asked the Great Healer to bless the simple means. 
 
 Herbert was better in the morning ; but that nasty troublesome 
 cough kept him a prisoner in his rooms for several days. The 
 Dean came over to see him while he was at breakfast, and recom- 
 mended that his college commons should be supplemented by a 
 dish of oatmeal porridge. 
 
 ' I take it every morning myself,' he said. ' I have taken it for 
 years. I do not think that I could get through the day without it.' 
 
 And then he told Herbert that he had talked Brown's case over 
 with his tutor, and that he had promised to consider it. 
 
 Mr. Routh not only considered it, but he wrote to Brown, and 
 Brown sent the letter on to Herbert. It was very curt and cold, 
 but it was to the purpose. 
 
 ' If you assure me,' Mr. Routh wrote, ' that you intend loyally 
 to submit to the college authorities, I will give you permission to 
 come up this term. But if you give any trouble by irregularities in 
 attendance at lectures, gates, chapels, or conduct in general, you 
 must expect this permission to be at any time withdrawn.' 
 
 It was under these auspices that Brown returned to Trinity. 
 
 He looked worn and anxious, Herbert thought, when the excite- 
 ment of the first greeting was over ; but he was as cheery and 
 hopeful as ever. It did Herbert's heart good to see his dear round 
 face beaming at him over the teapot, and pouring out all his simple 
 hopes and fears while the kettle was boiling. 
 
 He toasted the muffins, too, and was so absorbed in these interest- 
 ing topics that he involuntarily took off upon either surface of 
 them two fine proof impressions of the bars of Herbert's &rate. 
 
 Cudworth, who had returned the day previously, broke in upon 
 
134 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Brown's confidences by putting his rough carroty head into tha 
 room with a brutal inquiry, under the circumstances, of ' How's 
 Maria ?' 
 
 Brown looked up with sudden anguish in his face ; it had got 
 so red with the exertion of toasting the muffin, and so greasy with 
 eating it, that it was quite a sight to behold. 
 
 'Anything up?' Cudworth asked in a most unfeeling manner, 
 remarking Brown's facial contortion?. 
 
 Brown groaned, and Herbert begged Cudworth to come in and 
 shut the door — the draught was unbearable — and have a cup of 
 tea. 
 
 ' Nothing particular,' said Brown gloomily, ' only — she's thrown 
 me over.' 
 
 ' Hooray !' said Cudworth, throwing his cap in the air and 
 catching it ; 'there's some hope for you now, Brown.' 
 
 He had never learnt the true story of that photograph. 
 
 ' It served me right,' said Brown very despondently, eating the 
 muffin with some appetite. ' She never forgave me for being sent 
 down. Her grandfather was an Archdeacon, and when she heard 
 I'd given up the Church, and I was going into an office in the City, 
 or sheep farming in the colonies, she gave me up. It cost her a 
 great deal, she said ; but she's taken up since with a doctor in our 
 part, and — and I believe she's going to marry him. 1 
 
 ' Whew !' said Cudworth, with an unfeeling whistle. ' Grand- 
 father an Archdeacon !' 
 
 He swallowed his tea and retreated up to his garret ; and they 
 heard him singing on the way his favourite air, with variations : 
 
 ' Oh, Kicklebury Brown ! oh, Kicklebury Brown I 
 What a simple old man you are I' 
 
 Geraint did not come up until the last night and the last train. 
 An hour later, and he could not have kept the term. 
 
 Late as it was, he came up to Herbert's room. He was not in 
 bed, for he had been expecting him all day, and when he heard the 
 bustle of his arrival beneath he went out on the landing and 
 shouted out : 
 
 « Hullo !' 
 
 ' Hullo !' Geraint responded ; but the tone, hearty as it was, had 
 not the old ring in it. 
 
 He came up presently, with his big overcoat on that he had worn 
 for travelling. It was a bitter night, and he was smoking a huge 
 cigar. 
 
 When Herbert had put him in a chair — his best one — and taken 
 a good look at him, he remarked two things : The first, that the 
 expression of his face had changed ; it was grave and calm, with the 
 calmness of a settled purpose. And, secondly, that it had softened 
 wonderfully during these few weeks. It was no longer hard and 
 cynicaL 
 
THE DEAN'S RING. 135 
 
 ' Well ' he said, stretching out his legs before the cheerful blaze 
 of the fire that Herbert had considerately kept up, 'it's all over !' 
 
 ' What is all over ?' Herbert asked. 
 
 He had an impression of what was coming. 
 
 • The beginning of the end,' Geraiut answered quietly, puffing 
 away at his cigar. ' I have taken my last farewell of thenL I 
 shall never see their faces again. I shall never see the old place 
 
 101111 
 
 He went on smoking as if he had said the most commonplace 
 
 ' I— I hope you left good friends/ said Herbert hesitatingly. ' I 
 hope there was no row.' 
 
 ' Yes thank God, I have that comfort ! We parted the best of 
 friends' I stayed with them till the last moment. I could not 
 grudge them the last hour of my last vacation. Mary threw a slipper 
 after me for luck ; I have it in my pocket now.' And he took out 
 of the pocket of his overcoat a dainty lady"s slipper. ' And my oln 
 dotf followed me to the door. He is lame, and nearly blind. I 
 have had him ever since I was a boy, and he sat on the doorstep 
 and whined. The last impression I have of the home that will 
 never be a home to me again was the sound of the dear old dog's 
 lament— was the sight of Mary's dear face.' 
 
 He threw the end of the cigar into the fire, and rose up from bis 
 seat, sauntering towards the door, as if the conversation had grown 
 stupid and uninteresting. . 
 
 Herbert drew his hand across his eyes ; he had pictmed ma 
 moment the whole scene : the fair girl waving her adieux to the 
 lover whose face she would never see again ; the dumb, iaitniul 
 brute, with the unerring instinct of love, whining his sad lament 
 for the master he had loved all his life. _ ,,,.,. , , 
 
 ' Oh Geraint,' he exclaimed, moved out of himself, it is not too 
 
 'ate !' 
 
 ' It is quite too late, my dear fellow,' he said with a quiet smile. 
 ' As I told you before, I have counted the cost. My happiness, 
 and the happiness of these, are but as a feather in the balance m 
 comparison with my love for Hebe Bellenden.' 
 
 Herbert was silent. He never after this tried to reason with 
 him He knew that Geraint was as thoroughly persuaded of the 
 folly of his own course as he was, and that reason or warning would 
 be worse than useless. . . 
 
 Spurway had changed his rooms again at the beginning or. toe 
 term, and had migrated into a magnificent suite of rooms in 
 Neville's Court, so Brown had returned to his old quarters. He 
 brought a very modest amount of goods and chattels back with him 
 on this occasion. Remembering the uncertain tenure by which he 
 held his position there at all, with Mr. Routh's threat, like the 
 sword of Damocles, perpetually hanging over his head, perhaps it 
 was wise to do so. 
 
136 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The humiliation of that last exodus, when even his lamp and his 
 coal-scuttle were sent after him, the new tenant declining to take 
 them, was too fresh in his mind for him to bring anything with 
 him that he could possibly do without. There were no photographs 
 of Maria on the walls, and there was, alas ! no carpet on the floor ; 
 but there was a capital Windsor chair, and a lot of books on the 
 floor, that looked like work. 
 
 He went to chapel the first morning with Herbert, and his braces 
 did not provoke any expostulations from the Dean ; and he turned 
 up again, a little late, twice during the week, and then came a long 
 break. 
 
 His intentions were excellent ; but as he never got out of bed 
 until the chapel bell had ceased ringing, he hadn't the chance of 
 carrying them into effect. 
 
 Herbert was a prey to a good deal of uneasiness on his account. 
 Brown was always a trouble to him. Perhaps this was the reason 
 he loved him, on the same principle that a mother always loves the 
 ailing child of the family, who gives her more trouble than all the 
 rest put together. She can better spare them than the cripple who 
 has always been a care and an anxiety to her. 
 
 That bill of Grinley's was falling due shortly, and Brown had 
 made no preparation to meet it. Unless it could be renewed it 
 meant ruin. It had been renewed once, and the interest tacked on 
 to it, and it would be due again in a few weeks. 
 
 Brown, who habitually took a cheerful view of things, was 
 always expecting something to turn up. His easy nature led him 
 to put off the evil day until it was upon him. He never disturbed 
 his mind with anxieties and regrets until he was actually suffering 
 for the follies he deplored. 
 
 But as the evil day drew nearer, and nothing had turned up 
 wherewith to meet it — some old bills had turned up, which the Cam- 
 bridge tradesmen had considerately sent in when they discovered 
 that Brown had returned, but no ship had come sailing up the Cam 
 and anchoring in the Backs laden with specie, consigned to Brown 
 of Trinity — his cheerful face began to grow long and gloomy. 
 That is, it did at breakfast, where he was utterly despondent. 
 After lunch he was more hopeful. At tea, especially in other 
 men's rooms, where the fragrant herb may have had a finer 
 ilavour, he brightened considerably ; and after Hall his pleasant 
 face was as round and as cheerful as ever. 
 
 Grinley passed by Herbert's staircase now, when he went to 
 Spurway's rooms, and he generally passed by on the other side of 
 the quad. There was a decided coldness between him and Geraint, 
 and there were no other men on the staircase worthy of his atten- 
 tion. 
 
 He met Brown one day in the quad soon after he came up, and 
 inquired with an air of tender concern if he had made any prepara- 
 tion to meet the bill. Brown replied that he hadn't, and as far as 
 
THE DEAN'S RING. 137 
 
 he could see, that he was not likely to, and begged Grinley to 
 arrange with his friend for its renewal when it became due. 
 
 ' Itis not held by any friend of mine,' Mr. Grinley replied stiffly ; 
 'It was purely a business transaction with a money-lender. I only 
 undertook it to oblige you, Brown. I am very sorry that I did so, 
 as it has not been met. I cannot give you any further assistance. 
 I can only advise you, as a friend, to have the money ready by the 
 time.' 
 
 And so he went his way humming an opera air, and familiarly 
 capping the tutor and the Dean, who happened to be crossing the 
 quad. He stood so well with the authorities, whether of his own 
 college or the University, and was a personal friend of the Sub- 
 proctor. 
 
 He had never got mixed up in any disreputable proceedings ; he 
 had never been in a row, or given the college authorities any 
 trouble whatever all the time he had been up. He kept his chapels 
 when other men were in bed, and attended lectures with a 
 regularity that won him the good opinion of the Professors ; and 
 his gates — well, that was a matter between him and his landlady. 
 He had never occasion to attend a levee at the Dean's to explain 
 any irregularities. 
 
 Poor Brown felt like a black sheep beside this spotless lamb, 
 that wore the time-honoured gown of King's. There was very 
 little of Brown's gown left to wear. It was rent in twain up the back, 
 and had a jagged fringe round the tail, that his friends good- 
 naturedly said represented the battlements of Trinity, with a 
 battlement or two missing. And his cap was like the Queen of 
 Sheba ; it had no strength left in it, but hung down limp and 
 dejected at each of the four corners. He crept back to his rooms 
 under the severe scrutiny of his tutor, a very disreputable mote in 
 the sunshine of the Great Court of Trinity in his ragged gown, and 
 burst into Herbert's room. Harvard wn? there, and Jayne, who 
 always received him with open arms. 
 
 He held his tongue, but he flung off his gown, and sat moodily 
 by the 5re, and Herbert noticed presently that he began to shiver. 
 
 4 Cold, old fellow ?' he enquired, throwing the contents of the 
 scuttle on the fire. 
 
 ' N — o — o,' said Brown with chattering teeth ; 'its no — — thing, 
 tha — a — nks.' 
 
 ' But it is something, my dear fellow,' Jayne said, with some con- 
 cern. ' Now, a cup of coffee would be just the thing.' 
 
 Brown smiled feebly. 
 
 'I kn— o— ow yon hav — en't any bra— a — n — dy,but Geraint * 
 
 he said, looking at Herbert. 
 
 ' All right,' said Herbert ; " I know where he keeps it ;' and he 
 flew down over the staircase to Geraint's rooms, presently reappear- 
 ing with a liquenr-bottle and a glass. 
 
 'Now, old man !' 
 
138 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 He had poured out the brandy, and was holding it to Brown's 
 trembling lips, when Harvard came up and put it quietly aside. 
 
 ' Hold on !' he said ; ' that's the devil's remedy. He always 
 tempts a fellow when he's weak. I'll tell you the best cure for the 
 shivers. Have a turn with the gloves, Brown ?' 
 
 Now, Brown was a great hand at sparring. It was one of the 
 few things that he could do well. If there had been a Tripos in 
 that line, he would have taken very high honours. 
 
 His eyes brightened in a moment. 
 
 ' Have you got any glo — o — ves ?' 
 
 Herbert made another raid on Geraint's belongings, and brought 
 up a couple of pairs of gloves. 
 
 They pushed aside the table, and made a clear space in the 
 centre of the room, and the men stood up. Brown was out of 
 training, and Harvard had the advantage of several inches of arm, 
 besides being a much heavier man. It was all Brown could do to 
 keep on his legs. Harvard withstood his rushes like a stone 
 wall, and Brown fairly winded himself in his futile efforts to get 
 at him. In a few minutes he was glowing all over with the exercise 
 and excitement, and had long ceased to shiver. 
 
 Harvard laughed and threw off the gloves. 
 
 'Now,' he said, 'which is the best physic — the devil's or mine? 
 Whenever you have a screw loose, old man, have a turn at the 
 gloves. NeYer mind if you haven't anyone to set to with ; have a 
 go at the wall.' 
 
 Brown took his advice, and whenever anything went wrong with 
 him sparred at an imaginary antagonist, in the form of a bolster he 
 had set up against his wall. But no amount of sparring would 
 ward off the evil day. When it was within approachable distance 
 Grinley made him a very generous offer, He had gone over to 
 Grinley's rooms to talk the matter over with him. 
 
 It was out of pure kindness, he assured him, that he took this 
 trouble on his account. He had no personal interest whatever in 
 the mattter. If Brown would tell him exactly his circumstances, 
 he would advise him the best thing to be done. So Brown sat 
 down, and poured out his simple story. 
 
 Of his present means he had nothing to tell. No generoua 
 allowance from the paternal coffers for the expenses incidental to 
 a University career was his — only a small sum counted out care- 
 fully from that slender home purse that had so many claims upon 
 it, at the beginning of each term. Of his future prospects there 
 was little more to be said. There was the munificent sum of two 
 hundred pounds, the legacy of a maternal aunt, coming to him 
 when he attained the age of twenty-three years ; and beyond this 
 there was nothing for him to fall back upon, except, indeed, that 
 little division which must come some sad — let us hope far-off — 
 day, when the children in that humble vicarage should be dispersed, 
 and should receive the portion that appertained to them. 
 
THE DEAN'S RING. 139 
 
 It was not a very hopeful look-out for the holder of the bill. 
 Of course, if Brown should be ordained there would be an imme- 
 diate access of capital in that splendid stipend that he would receive 
 as a curate. 
 
 Grinley's face grew darker as he listened to Brown's very straight- 
 forward account of his future prospects, which, to do him justice, 
 he told without the slightest ostentation. 
 
 ' You should have explained all this before the bill was drawn/ 
 Grinley said severely. ' You have placed me in a very awkward 
 position in introducing you to — to the person who advanced the 
 money.' 
 
 Brown ventured to say that there was no one regretted it so 
 much as he did, but Grinley checkod him impatiently. 
 
 ' It is too late to regret it now,' he replied coldly. ' I do not 
 know what you think of the transaction, Mr. Brown ; but it appears 
 to me, under the circumstances, that you have raised this sum by 
 very questionable means. It is impossible to say what view would 
 be taken of it if it should happen to come into court ; but gentle- 
 men do not usually raise money by — pardon my plainness — by such 
 fraudulent means.' 
 
 Brown's face had assumed a grayish tint at the suggestion of the 
 matter coming into court, and at Grinley's last words it grew quite 
 ghastly with mingled incredulity and horror. 
 
 ' You — you don't mean,' he gasped, ' that it isn't all square !' 
 
 'It isn't square by any means, Mr. Brown, to borrow so large a 
 sum of money when you have no means, on your own showing, of 
 repaying it. It quite comes, I should take it, under the category of 
 an intended fraud.' 
 
 Brown turned white to the lips. 
 
 ' God forbid !' he groaned, moved quite out of himself by the 
 terrible accusation ; 'anything — anything but that !' 
 
 And then he recollected himself for a moment, and, with a cer- 
 tain dignity in the midst of his abjectness, he turned upon Grinley. 
 
 'You — you yourself suggested it. I should never have thought 
 of such a thing.' 
 
 ' I did it to oblige you. My action in the matter was quite dis- 
 interested.' 
 
 ' But you had the money,' Brown said feebly. 
 
 'I had the sum you were indebted to me, Mr. Brown,' Grinley 
 said coldly ; ' I advanced a large sum of money to save you from a 
 disgraceful row. I paid your debts at Newmarket, and — and this 
 is your gratitude !' 
 
 ' I — I beg your pardon,' said Brown humbly ; ' I am very much 
 obliged to you, I'm sure ; but I never thought it would come to 
 this.' 
 
 ' There is but one thing to be done,' Mr. Grinley resumed with 
 grave deliberativeness, as if Brown's apology were quite beneath his 
 notice ; ' there is but one thing to be done, Mr. Brown, and that ia 
 
r 4 o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 to pay the interest upon the amount until you are in a position to 
 take up the bill. Now, for what length of time do you wish the 
 bill to be renewed, if the party who holds it is willing upon these 
 terms to renew it ?' 
 
 Brown breathed more freely. 
 
 • Oh, if you would !' he gasped. ' In a year from this time I shall 
 have come into that legacy, and then I can pay the remainder by 
 degrees.' 
 
 'I will write to the holder of the bill,' said the other, with a 
 coldly condescending air that nipped Brown's expressions of grati- 
 tude in the bud, ' and submit your proposal to him ; but I am not 
 at all prepared to say that he will accept it.' 
 
 A few days after this interview, Brown received a communication 
 from Grinley to the effect that the holder of the bill had consented, 
 in consideration of the sum of fifty pounds being paid as interest, 
 to renew the bill for twelve calendar months — conditionally on the 
 said sum of fifty pounds being paid on the day that the bill became 
 due. 
 
 Brown received this communication with wholly unmixed feelings. 
 He had long been a prey to foolish and unavailing remorse, but now 
 that had given place to despair. 
 
 It was all very well for Grinley to talk about fifty pounds, but 
 how was he to raise fifty pounds ? He dared not apply to his 
 father. He had already nearly broken the dear old fellow's heart, 
 and drained his slender exchequer. He could not confide in his 
 tutor : he had never yet gone to him in any perplexity, and Mr. 
 Routh's cold, unsympathetic manner rather repelled than invited 
 confidence. He had no one to confide in in his trouble but 
 Herbert, who was younger and more inexperienced than himself. 
 
 Herbert raved, in his foolish, impetuous manner, more than 
 Brown. He would have talked the matter over with Jayne and 
 Harvard, or got Geraint to help him ; but Brown was so proud, or 
 shy, or haunted with a dreadful fear of the transaction, which he 
 had now come to look upon as fraudulent and criminal, being 
 known, that he bound Herbert down in the most solemn manner 
 to keep his secret. And so he went on his sorrowful way, fretting 
 his heart out as the awful day approached when the bill fell due, 
 and being as powerless to provide the interest as he would have 
 been to provide the principal, if Mr. Grinley had not used his 
 friendly interest to induce the holder to accept these generoug 
 ierir.s 
 
A RUBY NECKLACE. 141 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 A RUBY NECKLACE. 
 
 G-eraint had altered wonderfully this term. A look of strong, 
 settled serenity had taken the place of the air of indolent, cynical 
 indifference that used to characterize him. 
 
 He had changed, but he bad changed for the better. 
 
 He went to the house at Chesterton every night that Miss 
 Bellenden received her friends ; twice if not three times a week. 
 Whether his visits were welcome or not he went, and allowed him- 
 self, no doubt, to be blackmailed like any ingenuous freshman. 
 Herbert remarked, when he visited the house again, after a long 
 absence, that there were none of the old set there. No men of 
 their second year, only smooth-faced freshmen, who, with their 
 term's allowance in their pockets, rushed greedily at the bait. 
 
 There were no lovely girl-undergraduates from Girton or Newn- 
 ham waiting to be wooed in the soft, rosy light of Miss Bellenden's 
 fairy lamps now. The society of the Myrtles, Chesterton, had 
 changed since Herbert's last visit. The ladies' colleges were no 
 longer represented, though there was a fair sprinkling of freshmen 
 from nearly every college in Cambridge. Consequently, there was 
 less music, and the real business of the evening being untrammelled, 
 began earlier — an important consideration for men in their first 
 year. 
 
 There was a great deal less coffee consumed, though it was still 
 en evidence, but champagne flowed freely. 
 
 Julie came in rather late, and alone ; Spurway was not with her. 
 Miss Bellenden received her with her accustomed grace, and intro- 
 duced her to Herbert as Madam Spurway. 
 
 ' Oh, I forgot,' she said, checking herself. ' You are old friends ; 
 you come from the same county.' 
 
 Herbert blushed his reddest, but Julie was quite at her ease. 
 She had such a delightful manner, wherever she had acquired it. 
 and withal was so charmingly droll, that the foolish undergraduate 
 forgot all about the trouble she had been the cause of, and his vir- 
 tuous scruples about touching pitch, before the evening was half 
 over. 
 
 Julie was pinker than ever — at least, her complexion was — and 
 there was some wonderful pigment beneath her eyes that increased 
 their brilliancy. She wore jewels on her pretty throat, and her 
 bare arms, and her bosom ; but bright as they were, gleaming on 
 her white skin, and amid the laces of her rich dress, they were dim 
 beside the living light that flashed from her sparkling eyes. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden, after the first cold greeting, kept apart from 
 her ; and Herbert thought he traced beneath the habitual coldness 
 and indifference of her manner a veiled impatience of Julie's 
 
i 4 2 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 presence there. Grinley was by her side, bland and smiling ; and 
 looking at the two, seated side by side in the soft rosy light, 
 Herbert could not help thinking how well they were matched. 
 
 Perhaps others thought so, too, for he Baw a scornful smile 
 curling the corner of Hebe's lips as she glanced across the table at 
 Geraint. They were playing at the same table, with a few other 
 men ; but most of the men crowded round Julie. She had admirers 
 without end; and she exerted all her little arts, that Herbert knew 
 so well, to attract the foolish, innocent fellows. Grinley was her 
 partner ; and the moths that fluttered round that attractive table 
 had to pay dearly for the smiles she was pleased to bestow upon 
 them. 
 
 Herbert, sitting moodily in a corner, dull and neglected, knowing 
 nobody, watched the little games of cross-purposes that were being 
 played before his eyes, in the position of a spectator who had the 
 key to several mysteries. 
 
 He saw more clearly now than he had done on the occasion of his 
 former visits. He had been behind the scenes, as it were, and had 
 a private introduction to the skeleton of the Myrtles. It was 
 rattling its dry bones now, but the buzz of talk drowned the un- 
 pleasant sound. There was — well, if not exactly a frown, which 
 is not well-bred in receiving visitors — there were lines above Miss 
 Bellenden's level brows as she glanced over to the table where 
 Madam Spurway and Grinley had all the fun, and all the talk, and, 
 as it happened, all the luck to themselves. 
 
 Not that Miss Bellenden could complain ; her usual good fortune 
 had attended her to-night ; but Hebe had been losing all the 
 evening. She rose from the table presently, and pushed the cards 
 from her wearily, and with what Herbert, holding the clue of 
 several mysteries in his hands, thought an air of disgust and 
 loathing, she went over to the piano. 
 
 Geraint whispered a few words to him as he sauntered through 
 the room, and presently took the vacant seat beside the piano. In 
 pursuance of Geraint's entreaty, Herbert got up from his corner 
 and crossed over to the table that Hebe had risen from. He 
 paused for a moment behind Grinley, and in that moment, when 
 nis neighbourhood was unsuspected, intercepted a flash of intelli- 
 gence from Julie's bright eyes to her partner opposite. Herbert 
 had seen that look before in another woman's eyes, and he recog- 
 nised it in a moment. Julie had been an apt pupil. 
 
 He sat down somewhat unwillingly at the table, in Geraint's 
 seat, and played sixpenny nap with the boys until Geraint rose to 
 go. 
 
 'How blind they must be!' he said to himself, as he looked 
 across the room to the lovers at the piano. There was no mistaking 
 the passion in Geraint's eyes as he bent over Hebe ; the flame that 
 had smouldered all the evening had burst into a blaze now. 
 Herbert was so sorry for him, but he could not help being touched 
 
A RUBY NECKLACE. 143 
 
 by that sacred fire that was shining in his frank blue eyes, in his 
 tender devotion to this woman who was so unworthy of him — at 
 least, in Herbert's eyes. 
 
 And Hebe ? "Well, he couldn't see anything but her back hair. 
 It was the loveliest hair in the world — every thread of it was living 
 gold ; but it was not expressive of any deep feeling. 
 
 Grinley rose presently, and asked Hebe to sing. There was a 
 heap of songs on the piano, and Geraint picked out one and opened 
 it before her. She was striking the first notes, when Grinley, with 
 his shining smile and his shining teeth, stooped over her, and said 
 a few words in her ear. She turned just a shade pale under her — 
 her becoming colour, and put the song aside, selecting another 
 from the heap. 
 
 Perhaps he was not so blind as he seemed. 
 
 Geraint rose at once to go, and Hebe said good-night without 
 taking her eyes off the music before her. 
 
 ' I have lost five shillings for you,' said Herbert ruefully, as they 
 wended their way homeward in a decidedly disagreeable storm of 
 rain and sleet. He had only his gown over his dress suit ; and as 
 undergraduates have a recognised law that umbrellas are wholly 
 inadmissible, under any circumstances, with academicals, the 
 foolish fellow was entirely at the mercy of the elements. • 
 
 He preserved his dignity, but he caught a cold. 
 
 ' If you had lost five pounds I should have been delighted,' said 
 Geraint gaily. 'Hebe has promised to come down to the river and 
 see us start to-morrow ; and there is something she has overheard 
 about your frieud Brown she wants to tell you, if you can get an 
 opportunity of speaking to her on the bank. You'll have to dodge 
 it — take an opportunity when Miss Bellenden is engaged. Couldn't 
 yoa pretend to coach them in the technicalities of the race, walk- 
 ing with them up the bank, and then take your chance ?' 
 
 'What can she know about it ?' said Herbert. 
 
 ' It is something important, I think, or she wouldn't be so much 
 in earnest. I fancy Brown has been mixed up with Grinley in 
 some shady transactions, hasn't he ? Before he went down I 
 mean ?' 
 
 The wind was blowing unspeakably over Magdalene Bridge, and 
 Herbert lost his cap and his dignity, too, in a race all through 
 Bridge Street after it ; and when he caught it up he was much 
 too busy shaking the wet out of it to answer Geraint's question. 
 
 He went down to the river next day when the eights were out 
 practising, and met the Miss Bellendens on the bank. Madam 
 Spur way was there too ; she had left her dogcart in the road, and 
 was walking on the towpath in a severe tailor-made costume, with 
 a coquettish little hat, and a fierce-looking bull-dog following at 
 her heels. 
 
 This was not the first time that Herbert had met her on the tow- 
 path when the eights were practising. Julie was ubiquitoua. 
 
144 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Wherever there were masculine eyes in sufficient numbers to 
 admire her she was to be found. He saw her often enough driving 
 through the town, with a bull-dog in front and a tiger behind, and 
 at University matches and sports, where the female portion of the 
 visitors gave her a wide berth. But she was not dismayed by the 
 coldness of her reception. The cold shoulder was no strange joint 
 to Julie. It had been the piece de resistance of her youth. 
 
 Hebe Bellenden detached herself from the others, and, on the 
 pretext of asking Herbert some questions about the crews, loitered 
 with him for a few seconds on the bank. 
 
 'You have a friend, a Mr. Brown ?' she said hurriedly. 'Tell 
 me, has he any transactions with — with Mr. G-rinley, that are 
 causing him any uneasiness ?' i 
 
 ' He has very serious transactions with Mr. G-rinley,' Herbert 
 answered in a low voice, bending down over her, but with his 
 attention entirely concentrated on the river (Miss Bellenden had 
 missed Hebe, and was looking round), ' that are causing him the 
 greatest uneasiness.' 
 
 ' Does he owe him money ? Don't look at me ; keep your eyes 
 on the river.' 
 
 She was so absorbed by what was passing on the river, that she 
 had raised her dainty little eyeglass, and was surveying some 
 distant object through it. 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' How much ?' She was so occupied with that distant object 
 that she did not see Miss Bellenden's impatient gesture. 
 
 1 Two hundred and fifty pounds — and interest.' 
 
 ' When is it due ?' 
 
 ' To-morrow.' 
 
 ' To-morrow ! — so soon ?' 
 
 ' Yes ; but there will be three days' grace. It might be three 
 years so far as Brown is concerned. It is impossible for him to 
 meet it.' 
 
 They were standing in a little knot of spectators, who were 
 watching the boats turn the corner. It was a most engrossing 
 spectacle, and Miss Bellenden's attention was diverted. 
 
 ' What will he do ?' 
 
 ' He can do nothing. It means ruin.' 
 
 ' Cannot his friends help him ?' 
 
 ' He dare not ask his friends. God knows, I would help him 
 willingly, if I had the money. Fifty pounds would save him — 
 would stave it off — for a year.' 
 
 'And he cannot possibly raise this? — Keep your eyes on the 
 boats ; point to them quickly — don't look at me.' 
 
 She was so eager in the interest she feigned that again she 
 missed her sister's impatient summons. 
 
 ' He cannot possibly raise it.' 
 
 'And he is your friend? I'm very sorry. You are looking at 
 
A RUBY NECKLACE. 145 
 
 me — see, they have turned the corner !' and Hebe Bellenden 
 hurried on to join her sister. 
 
 1 He is my dearest friend. He is the best fellow in the world. — 
 Yes, they turned the corner splendidly. We are sure to make one 
 bump, if not two !' 
 
 ' You will catch a cold standing about on the bank, Hebe, and 
 you'll be hoarse for a week. I didn't know that you were so in- 
 terested in the boats.' 
 
 Miss Bellenden spoke sharply. The wind was cold — one of 
 those stiff north-easters which may be enjoyed any day in the 
 early spring months on the Long Reach, where the wide fields on 
 either side of the Cam stretch themselves as flatly as possible, so 
 as not to offer any obstacle in the way of a good blow. 
 
 Herbert said nothing to Brown about this conversation. What 
 was the use of it ? He did ask himself what interest Hebe 
 Bellenden could possibly take in Brown's concerns, seeing that she 
 did not even know him. 
 
 Geraint, all aglow from the boats, joined him on Midsummer 
 Common. His frank face was flushed with the exertion, and 
 his crisp, fair curls were tumbled with the wind, and his thin 
 blazer served only to display the splendid proportions of his 
 magnificent frame. He had a woollen scarf wound round his 
 throat, but he had no overcoat, and he ran by Herbert's side 
 across the common and down Jesus Lane on their way back to 
 Trinity. 
 
 ' Well,' he said, as he panted by his side ' you saw her ?' 
 
 ■ Yes.' 
 
 Herbert had no hesitation in talking over Brown's affairs with 
 Hebe, but with Geraint it was quite another thing. 
 ' Weil ?' he inquired. 
 
 ■ Well ?' said Herbert. 
 
 He didn't Like to dissimulate with Geraint, but he was not at 
 liberty to repeat the conversation. 
 
 ' Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Geraint stiffly ; that is, as stiffly 
 as he could under the circumstances, with the wind in his teeth and 
 out of breath with running ; ' I didn't know there was anything 
 private.' 
 
 Herbert would have explained or said something to pacify him 
 if he had given him the chance ; but Geraint turned into another 
 man's rooms in Jesus Lane, and he had to pursue his way back to 
 Trinity alone. 
 
 He saw no more of Geraint that night, and Brown was so 
 miserable and depressed that he didn't go to Hall, and kept his cak 
 sported all the evening. 
 
 Cud worth had met him during the day coming out of a chemist's 
 6hop in the Petty Cury looking very white and flurried. 
 
 'I didn't likj the look of him,' said Cudworth, wagging his head 
 with an air of grave concern, 'so I just stepped in and bough* 
 
 10 
 
146 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 some eau de Cologne, and asked casually what he had been up to. 
 Now, what on earth do you think he wanted ?' 
 
 ' I'm sure I don't know,' said Herbert, turning white. 
 
 1 Why, prussic acid, of all things in the world ! Just as if 
 chemists sold that over the counter like carbonate of soda ! It 
 strikes me there's something up with Brown ; he ought to be 
 watched.' 
 
 It struck Herbert so too. He remembered all at once that that 
 miserable bill fell due to-morrow. His conscience quite pricked 
 him for having left Brown alone so long, so with a beating 
 heart he stepped over to Brown's door and thundered upon his oak. 
 
 It was one of their old signals when Brown lived in a state of 
 siege, before the duns were paid off at such a fearful cost. Brown 
 did not respond to the signal at once, and Herbert repeated it, 
 while Cud worth stood by with an unmistakable look of alarm 
 on his face. 
 
 The door was opened presently by Brown, who had groped his 
 way to it in the dark. 
 
 There was scarcely any fire in the grate, and the lamp was not 
 lit. The men lighted his lamp, and stirred up his fire into a cheer- 
 ful blaze and made his kettle boil, and insisted on his drinking 
 some coffee. His commons were on the table untouched for the 
 day ; and Cudworth suddenly remembered that he had had some 
 wonderful potted turkey, ' that beat all the pate defoie gras in the 
 world to shivereens,' as he expressed it, that had been sent to him 
 from home ; and he flew up the ladder-case to his garret and 
 brought it down, and sat by singing ridiculous snatches of comic 
 songs, while Brown made a substantial meal. 
 
 They waited till his old happy nature asserted itself, and his fit 
 of the blues had quite disappeared, and then they went back, not 
 without some trepidation, to their rooms. 
 
 ' Good night, old fellow,' said Brown, when Herbert went away ; 
 ' there are yet two more days. Perhaps something will turn up !' 
 
 Nothing did turn up except the wettest and dreariest of February 
 mornings. 
 
 There was not a sign of a sail on the Cam as it wound sluggishlj 
 through the Backs. There were thousands of ever-widening 
 circles on its surface as the rain poured steadily down, but no 
 barque from isles afar, with impatient keel grounding in the bank 
 off Trinity. 
 
 No. Brown's ship had not come in during the night. And it 
 didn't come in during that long dreary February day. He didn't 
 go down the river to look for it, but sat in his rooms with his oak 
 sported, looking gloomily out into the Great Court. 
 
 Herbert went over once or twice to see things were all right, and 
 to pile up Brown's fire, which, cold as it was, he forgot to mend, 
 but sat through the day in his solitary arm-chair, with his face 
 buried in his hands, a prey to unavailing remorse. 
 
A RUBY NECKLACE. 147 
 
 The next day pas?ed just as miserably, except that instead of 
 rain there wa9 a mist — a thick gray Cambridge mist blotting and 
 blurring out all the familiar objects in the Great Court, the 
 fountain, the hall, the chapel, and swallowing up the ghostly figures 
 of the men as they hurried across it — a regular wet blanket over 
 everything. 
 
 Herbert didn't care to leave Brown alone on the staircase, so he 
 didn"t go to chapel. The bell had ceased ringing, and the last 
 surplice flying across the court had been swallowed up by the fog, 
 and the night was closing in. 
 
 He had not lit his lamp, and he sat in the gloaming staring 
 moodily into his fire, thinking of the little mother: he always 
 thought of her at this twilight hour, of those happy days that 
 seemed so long ago, when he used to burst in fresh from school ; 
 when the mists of that wet West- Country were creeping up from the 
 river, and swallowing up all the little white town of Bideford — all 
 but the dear old familiar cottage, where a fire blazed upon the 
 hearth, and a table was spread with the simple fare, and a dear 
 face beamed with the tenderest welcome ! 
 
 He saw it all now, as he looked into the glowing embers. He 
 heard the well-remembered accents of the dear voice that he had 
 not heard for, oh, so long ! when there came a low rap at his door 
 and it slowly opened. 
 
 He saw it was a woman's figure, as he rose from his seat with a 
 strange expectancy. Was it the little mother ? 
 
 The room was so dark, and the lady was veiled, but the figure 
 was familiar. She came hurriedly forward to the table where he 
 was standing with his heart strangely beating. It was Hebe 
 Bellenden. 
 
 ' Miss Bellenden !' he exclaimed in a tone of surprise. 
 
 ' Hush !' she said, raising her hand with a warning gesture. ' No 
 one must know that I am here — that I have been here. I can trust 
 you, Mr. Flowers ; I have trusted you before.' 
 
 Herbert bowed his head, and waited for her to speak further, to 
 explain this unlooked-for visit. 
 
 'Your friend, Mr. Brown,' she began nervously, and speaking in 
 a low, hurried voice, 'is unable, you say, to— to meet a liability he 
 has incurred ; and the pavment of the interest would give him 
 time ?' 
 
 She paused and looked np into Herbert's face. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said sadly ; • it would give him time ; but he cannot 
 raise the money.' 
 
 ' I do not know Mr. Brown,' she said softly, still looking at 
 Herbert with an expression he had never seen before in her beau- 
 tiful dark eyes ; ' but he is a friend of yours, and he is in trouble.' 
 
 1 He is in great trouble !' Herbert said gravely. 
 
 'I have no money ; I would let him have it willingly if I had, 
 for your sake, Mr. Flowers ; but I have some jewellery that would 
 
 10—2 
 
148 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 fetch something, that would nearly— nearly, if not quite, cover the 
 amount. Will you, as his friend, sell it or pawn it ; any jeweller 
 will lend you money upon it. See, the stones are real !' 
 
 She opened a little case she had concealed beneath her cloak as 
 she spoke, and flashed before Herbert's astonished eyes the ruby 
 necklace that she had worn on that eventful night. 
 
 The fire leaped up into a sudden flame, and shone upon the gems 
 that she held in her hand, every separate ruby flashing in the fire- 
 light like a drop of blood. 
 
 Herbert remembered them quite well, and the scene, as it had ao 
 often done before, rose up before him. 
 
 ' I — I do not think I am justified in — in accepting this sacrifice, 
 Miss Bellenden,' he stammered, drawing back involuntarily from 
 the proffered gift. 
 
 ' It is no sacrifice,' she said impatiently ; ' it is my pleasure to 
 do it. Will you or will you not save your friend ?' 
 
 ' I have no choice if you put it in that way,' said Herbert 
 humbly ; ' but may I tell Brown who it is that has come to his 
 assistance ?' 
 
 ' You will not tell Mr. Brown anything !' she said haughtily. 
 ' It is for your sake, not for Mr. Brown's, that I take this unusual 
 curse.' 
 
 Her colour deepened as she was speaking, and her voice was 
 tremulous, and Herbert saw that the hand that gathered up the 
 jewels into the case trembled. 
 
 ' I must not appear in this ; and he — he must never know.' 
 
 She made a motion with her hand that Herbert quite understood 
 as meaning Geraint, and if he had not, the tell-tale blush upon her 
 lovely face would have told him. 
 
 ' But who — where am I to say the money came from ?' Herbert 
 blurted out in the awkwardest way in the world. 
 
 'From wherever you like, Mr. Fowers,' she said, her eyes kindling 
 and her cheeks flushing. 'It is not often one can repay an 
 obligation so easily. I owe you more than I can ever repay you. 
 If you will promise me that your friend shall never know where 
 this money has come from, I am sure I can trust your honourable 
 word.' 
 
 But Herbert did not promise her. He looked into her eyes ; 
 they were soft and tender, and wet with tears ; and a mad impulse 
 came over him to go down on his knees before her, now that this 
 mood was on her, and beg her to spare his friend — to spare 
 Geraint. 
 
 Did she read this purpose in his eyes ? 
 
 She dropped her veil and gathered her cloak hurriedly around 
 her. 
 
 ' I have stayed too long,' she said ; ' the men will be coming out 
 of chapel soon. You will keep my secret, Mr. Flowers ?' 
 
 She bowed her head haughtily with her old, cold, disdainful 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: 149 
 
 manner, and walked over to the door. Herbert opened it for her, 
 and went down the staircase with her. The organ was rolling out 
 its final benediction, and the white-robed congregation was pouring 
 out of the chapel door, but before it could reach across the Grc-at 
 Court the fog had swallowed up the retreating figure of Hebe 
 Bellenden, 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 'lead us not into temptation.' 
 
 * All within was noise of son^s and clapping hands, 
 And boys that crashed the glass and beat the floor.' 
 
 It was already too late for Herbert to be seen in the streets of 
 Cambridge without his academicals, and he hesitated to wear the 
 gown of Trinity on this his first visit to a pawnbroker. 
 
 He knew exactly where to find one, for he had had serious 
 thoughts more than once of raising money on the old coach's silver 
 inkstand. 
 
 He went in modestly the nest morning and requested to see the 
 owner of the establishment. The young man in attendance, when 
 he learned the nature of his errand, explained to him, with a 
 severity of manner that was quite new to him in dealing with Uni- 
 versity tradesmen, that such transactions were conducted in an office 
 found the corner. 
 
 Herbert found the door, and in the entry was confronted by a 
 row of inner doors opening into separate loose-boxes. There was 
 a tenant already in the one he entered. A woman with an infant 
 in her arms was pleading hard for the loan of a half a crown for a 
 little worn circlet of gold that lay upon the counter. It was the 
 old story she was repeating— husband out of work, and children 
 crying for bread. 
 
 ' It's the last thing left, Mr. Jones,' she was saying when Herbert 
 came in. ' Everything's gone, bit by bit ; it's all we've got to Live 
 upon till my man gets about again. Make it half a crown !' 
 
 ' Eighteeupence,' said the man — ' not a penny more ; it's worn so 
 thin that it's only fit for breaking up.' 
 
 ' Two shillings, then !' she pleaded. 
 
 ' Eighteenpence, for the last time ; now, will you have it or 
 leave it ?' 
 
 He threw the money down upon the counter, and the woman 
 took it reluctantly but greedily, with a dreadful hunger in her 
 eyes. 
 
 Herbert opened the door for her to pass out, and as the east 
 wind swept in from the street the child in her arms, so scantily 
 protected from the cold by her thin shawl, began to cry. 
 
 It was Tommy's little brother. 
 
£50 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert drew back flushed and shamefaced, and laid the case with 
 Hebe Bellenden's jewels on the counter. 
 
 ' How much ?' the man asked, eyeing the gems with provoking 
 indifference. 
 
 1 As much as you can lend me upon them,' Herbert answered 
 modestly. 
 
 ' How much ?' he repeated impatiently ; ' name your figure.' 
 
 ' I want fifty pounds,' Herbert said, blushing in spite of himself. 
 
 The man laughed a little low chuckle. 
 
 ' I'll tell you what I'll do,' he said, holding the rubies so that the 
 light fell upon them ; 'I'll let you have twenty- five pounds. Not 
 a penny more.' 
 
 Herbert took the money, and a little cardboard ticket bearing his 
 name and address, ' Flowers, of Trinity,' and went his way. 
 
 He was too new to the shame and shifts of poverty to give a 
 false name and a false address. 
 
 He went up to Brown's room with a lighter heart than he had 
 had for many a day, and a heavier pocket. He had never had so 
 much money in his possession in his life before. Brown was sitting 
 before the fire, with his face buried in his hands, and his breakfast 
 untasted on the table. 
 
 He did not look up when Herbert came in. 
 
 ' Hullo !' Herbert bawled out when he opened the door ; 'cheer 
 up, old man ; your ship's come in !' 
 
 ' My ship ?' Brown repeated in a dazed manner. 
 
 ' Yes ; it's just come up the Backs. Now what do you say to 
 that for a cargo ?' 
 
 He took out the twenty-five sovereigns from his pocket in one 
 big handful, and threw them down on the table before Brown. 
 The gleam of the gold, the light in Herbert's eyes, the suddenness 
 of the whole thing, took his breath away, and he sat staring 
 stupidly at him across his untasted meal. 
 
 ' Good heavens !' he exclaimed, ' where did it come from ?' 
 
 ' Never mind where it came from, old man ; there it is, a loan 
 from an unknown friend, that you can repay any day whenever 
 you've got the money.' 
 
 ' But I must know who I am indebted to,' Brown said 
 nervously, looking at the shining heap with eyes of wonder. ' I 
 — I really could not accept a loan under such circumstances. You 
 haven't been talking of my affairs to anyone, Flowers ?' 
 
 Herbert put on his most princely air. 
 
 ' I have not spoken about your affairs to any man in Cambridge, 
 Mr. Brown,' he said stiffly. 
 
 ' Oh, come now,' said Brown humbly ; ' I'm very sorry, I am 
 sure ; I didn't mean that, Flowers. I have been so upset lately I 
 didn't know what I was saying. Of course I will take it, and 
 gladly. I shall accept it as from you, and some day, my dear boy, 
 when I get my first stipend, I shall repay it.' 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 1 151 
 
 He -was quivering with emotion, and his simple face was glowing 
 like coals as he counted out the gold on the table. 
 
 ' I should go to Grinley at once,' said his Mentor, standing by, 
 'and offer him half a year's interest. Perhaps by that time jcu 
 may see your way to take the accursed thing up, or find the money 
 to renew it.' 
 
 ' I'll go over after breakfast,' said Brown eagerly ; ' you'll come 
 with me ?' 
 
 ' No,' Herbert said, shaking his head decidedly ; 'I'd rather not 
 be mixed up in it. There is no need for you to tell him where the 
 money came from ; only'mind and get a proper receipt.' 
 
 * Trust me for that,' said Brown gaily ; ' I shall be as wise as a 
 serpent by-and-by ;' and his round face was beaming as if he had 
 never had a care in his life. 
 
 Herbert didn't see anything more of Brown until night. Instead 
 of his usual afternoon grind on the Trumpington road, he went 
 with Jayne to Barnwell. 
 
 It was dingier and drearier than ever by daylight, and a 
 February fog, that chilled one to the bone, rendered distant objects 
 indistinct, and near ones more squalid and repulsive than ever. 
 The fog had swallowed up all the towers and steeples of the 
 churches, but it made the lights burning in the publichouse 
 windows, behind the red curtains, more brilliant by comparison 
 — a deep glowing red, gleaming like evil eyes out on the bleak 
 waste of the long, flat, straggling streets. The smoke that had 
 ascended from the many chimneys had been stopped half-way, 
 and, mingling with the fog swooped down over Barnwell in a 
 murky, visible, tangible atmosphere of pea-soup colour. 
 
 In this melancholy place they came across Harvard. It was too 
 foggy on the river for the eights to be out, so he had given up the 
 afternoon to his boys in Barnwell. His hands were empty, but 
 Jayne's were full of tracts, which he had been leaving at poor 
 houses that he had passed, wherever they would receive them. 
 
 He put them into his pocket when Harvard came up. 
 
 ' He's a dear fellow,' he explained apologetically, ' but he doesn't 
 like tracts.' 
 
 Herbert smiled. He was very much of Harvard's way of 
 thinking ; he hadn't much opinion of tracts himself, however nice 
 and awakening they might happen to be. He had an old-fashioned 
 belief that the nearest way to the hearts of men and women, and 
 emphatically children, lay through their stomachs. 
 
 The great Teacher, who knew more about human nature than 
 His disciples, ^recognised this fact when He made the famished 
 multitude sit down on the hillside, and fed five thousand with that 
 wonderful food that was consumed without diminishing. Depend 
 upon it, His gracious message went home to the hearts of the men and 
 vomen of old more readily after that miraculous meal than when 
 they were exhausted with hunger by the way. 
 
152 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert remembered the morning's incident, and the pinched 
 face of Tommy's little brother. He told the story to the two men 
 as they walked through the street that Poverty has claimed for its 
 own. He didn't explain how it was he came to be there, to over- 
 hear the conversation ; he left the men to draw their own 
 conclusions. He was not the first undergraduate in Cambridge 
 that had stood in need of pecuniary assistance ; and there was no 
 University chest now, as there was in old time, to advance money 
 to needy students. 
 
 Harvard was for finding the woman out at once, but Jayne 
 stopped him. 
 
 ' The fact is,' he said modestly, ' I've given her a shilling a week 
 ever since the middle of last term ; and if we can make it, between 
 us, half a crown, and let her have it regularly, it'll be better than 
 anything spasmodic and occasional.' 
 
 They made up the sum before they left Barnwell, Herbert 
 promising his little weekly sixpence to the other men's shillings. 
 It only meant in his case sixpennyworth of denial in one form or 
 another ; he hadn't arrived yet at that luxurious form of philan- 
 thropy that costs nothing. His expenses were already cut down 
 to the lowest ebb. The daily round furnished more than he asked 
 or desired — room and to spare for hourly sacrifices and denials. 
 
 Brown was not in his room after Hall, but Herbert met him 
 later on in the evening in Geraint's room, which was the resort, not 
 only of the men of his staircase, but of many other staircases in 
 Trinity. He never had any need to ask his friends to wine in the 
 usual ceremonious way ; they came in unasked — ' dropped in ' as 
 they termed it. 
 
 There was a post-prandial wine in G-eraint's hospitable rooms 
 every day, and cards — not unirequently late into the night. The 
 highest play in Trinity, which was saying a good deal, and the best 
 comic song, which was, perhaps, saying more, were to be found 
 here. It ought to have been a select society of rich men, but poor 
 men had an unfortunate habit of ' dropping in.' 
 
 Brown had obviously no right there, with his slender purse, and 
 his tears of remorse scarcely yet dry, and those repeated vows of 
 amendment still fresh on his lips. Herbert may have thought bo 
 as he looked across the table and saw him playing nap with a 
 blissful unconsciousness of wrong-doing. 
 
 He was looking so happy and eager, so entirely absorbed in the 
 game, that Herbert thought, after the anxiety he had been a prey 
 to during the past week, this little breaking out wouldn't do him 
 much harm. 
 
 He hadn't the heart to take him away ; besides, he remembered 
 that Brown hadn't anything to lose beyond, maybe, a few loose 
 sixpences. 
 
 Geraint begged him to sit down and take a hand, the stakes were 
 very low, and he mechanically put his hands in his pockets. Ther* 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: 153 
 
 were no loose sixpences there. Nothing, indeed but his keys. He 
 rattled them drearily, and went out. Clearly it was no place for 
 him. 
 
 Later in the evening, after a couple of hours' work, he went over 
 to his neighbour's room, but Brown was not there. His fire waa 
 out, and his lamp had burnt low ; but the room was empty. 
 
 He went back into his own room and stirred up his fire into a 
 cheerful blaze, and sat down before it to wait up for Brown. 
 
 He waited up certainly, but he fell fast asleep in his chair, and 
 was roused suddenly, it might have been hours after, by the 
 slamming of the oak on the other side of the landing. He didn't 
 know how long he had slept, his fire was out, and his watch 
 had run down, and it was clearly too late to pay visits to his 
 friends. 
 
 It was very shivery in that narrow inner college bedroom, and he 
 hurriedly prepared to retire to rest. 
 
 There was an old-fashioned custom he still kept up, that worn strip 
 of carpet beside his bed attested its regularity, and while kneeling 
 there, very cold and sleepy, and by no means a prey to any ex- 
 citement or alarms, a strange thing happened. 
 
 1 Flowers ! Flowers !' 
 
 He heard the voice quite distinctly calling him. It was no 
 strange voice, and it did not cause his pulse to quicken. He paused 
 and listened, and finding all was quiet, repeated rather sleepily the 
 old familiar petition of his childhood. 
 
 ' Flowers !' 
 
 The voice was louder and more imperative, and he rose at once 
 from his knees and went into the outer room. It was quite empty, 
 and so was the landing beyond. He paused, looking down the dark 
 staircase where the cold night air was coming up sharp as a double- 
 edged razor. There was nothing else coming up or going down 
 that Herbert could see, and he turned back shivering to his own 
 room, when again he heard his name repeated. 
 
 ' Flowers !' 
 
 The voice was at his elbow. It came from Brown's room. 
 
 And then a stranger thing still happened, which he could never 
 explain. He did not knock loudly at the door as was his wont, but 
 he went quietly over and tried it. It was fastened. 
 
 Some strange, inexplicable impulse made him creep noiselessly 
 back to his own room and find the key of his oak. He had never 
 tried it to Brown's door, and it was the most unlikely thing in the 
 world that it would fit His hands trembled with eagerness as he 
 put it in the latch and turned it. It fitted perfectly, and the heavy 
 oak door swung noiselessly back. 
 
 There was a thin line of light beneath the inner door, and s 3 
 Herbert stood there, with an indefinable fear making his heart 
 stand still, a faint metallic sound came from the room beyond. 
 
 Click ! 
 
154 ^ FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 His hand was already on the handle of the door, and he opened 
 it noiselessly. But even as it swung slowly back there was a flash 
 and a report that echoed awfully up the silent staircase. 
 
 Herbert had sprung forward — henever after knew how he did it. 
 He covered the whole of the space from the door to the table, 
 where the wretched man was standing with a revolver in his hand, 
 in one leap, and knocked the dreadful thing aside, and it had gone 
 off harmlessly. He was grappling with him in a moment, fighting 
 fiercely for the possession of the weapon. Brown struggled with 
 the madness of despair, and when Herbert closed with him and 
 threw him on the ground, and wrenched it from him, the sweat 
 gathered on his forehead in great drops. 
 
 They stood confronting each other — Brown ghastly pale with 
 that cold sweat on his brow, and his breath coming painfully, and 
 Herbert, white to the lips, but cool and determined, and with the 
 cruel toy in his hand that he had wrested from him with 
 death larking in every chamber. 
 
 ' Oh, Brown !' was all he could say. 
 
 The wretched creature covered his eyes and cowered before him. 
 He put out his hand feebly as if feeling for the weapon. Herbert 
 drew it away, but he took the cold, clammy hand in his and pressed 
 it with an eager convulsive pressure. 
 
 It might have been lifeless now, never more to be pressed in 
 love or friendship, but for his timely aid ! He was too much 
 moved to speak. And Brown ? 
 
 Well, Brown was beaten ; he threw his arms around his neck and 
 wept upon his shoulder. 
 
 ' Thank God I was in time !' Herbert said presently. 
 
 Brown groaned aloud. 
 
 ' A moment more,' he said, or rather sobbed. 'Oh, Flowers, why 
 did you come ?' 
 
 'Hush!' Herbert said sternly, ' hush I remember in Whose 
 presence you stand. Good God, Brown, you might have been 
 before His throne now !' 
 
 He led him sobbing to the sofa, and there, side by side, with 
 Brown's head on his shoulder, the poor fellow poured out the miser- 
 able story of his folly and his crime. 
 
 ' Ob, Brown, my poor, dear fellow, what possessed you ?' 
 
 He could only sob upon his breast ; his self-control was quite 
 broken down. 
 
 ' How can I tell you ?' he moaned. ' You will never — never 
 forgive me, Herbert !' 
 
 He slipped from Herbert's encircling arm as he spoke, and to his 
 terror, indeed, he fell on his knees at his feet, with his poor 
 trembling hands upraised. 
 
 ' Only here — here on my knees — can I tell you ; only on my 
 knees can I ask yonr forgiveness, my best and kindest friend !' 
 
 To see him kneeling there, with his ghastly face, and that look 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION,' 155 
 
 of haggard, hunted helplessness in his eyes, gave Herbert a shock 
 through all his frame. 
 
 'Not of me— oh, not of me! but of God ask forgiveness, my 
 poor, dear fellow ! Tell Him, not me, what temptation brought 
 you to it — and — and ask Him, on your knees, for a way to escape 
 from it.' 
 
 Herbert was sobbing now, and his hands were on Brown's 
 shoulders, and he was bending down over him. 
 
 ' What temptation ? Oh, Flowers ! I have lost all the money 
 you brought me to-day. I lost it all to-night at cards !' 
 
 Herbert was silent. 
 
 Brown wrung his hands with a gesture of infinite remorse and 
 despair that touched him more than his words. 
 
 ']\Iy life has been a life of mistakes, and now, to-night, I thought 
 to retrieve the past. Fortune was favouring me, and I thought to 
 win back the whole, and I staked it all at hazard — and lost !' 
 
 'And was that all ?' Herbert asked with an air of relief. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said despairingly — 'enough, surely ! I had no alterna- 
 tive. Ruin or death stared me in the face — and I chose death. 
 Oh, Flowers, I could never, never face my poor father !' 
 
 'You did not think what this great sorrow, this disgrace, would 
 have been to him,' Herbert said sadly. 
 
 He could not bruise the broken reed at his feet with reproaches ; 
 he could not quench that smoking flax of repentance that was 
 flickering in Brown's soul, with a single word of reproof. 
 
 ' God forgive me !' he said humbly. ' I did not.' 
 
 Herbert let him sob out his broken thanks to the merciful Hand 
 that averted his thoughtless deed. And then he got his arms 
 about him to raise him up ; but the poor broken-down fellow only 
 pressed the hand that was nearest to him, and hung over it and wept. 
 
 ' I will never rise from my knees until you forgive me, Flowers !' 
 he sobbed. 
 
 'Dear old man, I forgive you with all my soul !' 
 
 And then he suffered him to raise him. 
 
 ' Now, Brown,' he said, when he was calmer, and he was leaving 
 him for the night, when he had tucked him up, if the truth must 
 be told, in the little bed in that narrow inner room, and had laid 
 a cool hand on his burning forehead, that felt like a benediction, 
 ' I am going to keep your secrets no longer. I have kept them too 
 long. You want direction as well as forgiveness, and, please God, 
 you shall have both.' 
 
 He went back to his own rooms, taking with him that ugly toy, 
 within whose magic circle lay the mysteries of death and eternity. 
 He remembered that interrupted prayer, and he finished it by his 
 bedside, on the little worn strip of carpet ; and again, with an 
 overflowing heart, he recognised the infinite insight into human 
 needs in that divine petition he had learned at his mother's knee, 
 * Lead us not into temptation.' 
 
s;6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 He repeated it again the next morning before he went to chapel 
 and the chapel-bell kept saying it as he crossed the Great Court, 
 and the organ repeated it, and every familiar sound of the day 
 whispered, ' Lead us not into temptation !' 
 
 Geraint was waiting for him at the foot of the staircase as he 
 came in from chapel. 
 
 'What on earth were you and Brown doing last night? I 
 thought the ceiling was coming in !' 
 
 Herbert had already told Brown that he was not going to keep 
 his secret any longer. And then, sitting by Geraint's fire, with 
 the French clock on the mantelpiece ticking off the solemn refrain 
 ihat was ringing in his ears, he told him the story of Brown's 
 trouble. 
 
 Geraint's fresh-coloured face was almost as white as Herbert's 
 when he finished the story. 
 
 ' Good God !' he gasped ; ' to think that a man could come to 
 that !' 
 
 He went over to his writing-table, and flinging his papers right 
 and left, he took out his cheque-book. 
 
 ' Now, Flowers,' he said, ' tell me the amount of that con- 
 founded bill.' 
 
 ' Two hundred and seventy-five pounds, with the interest,' 
 Herbert answered gloomily. ' I am going over after breakfast to 
 see the Dean ; and then — and then he must write to his father. 
 There is no other way.' 
 
 Geraint whistled. He remembered that little scene with Brown 
 patronus not a year ago. Herbert heard his pen travelling rapidly 
 across the paper, but his mind was too full of that coming interview 
 with the Dean to notice it. 
 
 ' There,' said Geraint, rising from his seat, and laying a narrow 
 strip of coloured paper down before him, ' there is another way I' 
 
 It was a cheque for two hundred and seventy-five pounds. 
 
 Herbert couldn't believe his eyes. 
 
 ' Oh, Geraint,' he said, ' this is very noble of you !' 
 
 ' Not a bit of it,' said the other lightly ; ' it is only paying off 
 an old score !' 
 
 ' I don't see how he is ever to repay you ?' 
 
 * And if he doesn't, what then ? He'll be my debtor instead of 
 Grinley's, and there'll be an end to that confounded interest. 
 Why didn't he con e to me at first ?' 
 
 'Why, indeed ? He was too proud, or too shy ; and, besides, if 
 this bill transaction had got wind, and reached Routh's ears, he 
 would have been sent down.' 
 
 ' He could have trusted me,' Geraint said, with a smile as tender 
 fis a woman's curling his frank, full lips. ' There will be no need 
 to tell the Dean now, Flowers — nor his father. I should like him 
 to stand well with his governor ; the poor old chap's had enough to 
 bear.' 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: 157 
 
 Hg flung away the end of the cigar he was smoking, and gazed 
 thoughtfully into the fire. 
 
 'No ; if you think not,' Herbert answered reflectively ; 'but we 
 must leave that to Brown : he seems in the mood to make a clean 
 breast of it all.' 
 
 ' And get sent down for his pains !' said Geraint shortly. 
 
 Herbert took the cheque up into Brown's room. Jayne was 
 alreadj r there with him. Herbert had told him all the miserable 
 story as tbey walked across the court to chapel, and he had gone 
 straight up to Brown's room on his return. 
 
 Herbert opened the door without knocking, and a strange sight 
 met his eyes. 
 
 The two men were kneeling at the table, where Brown's humble 
 morning meal was spread, and open before them was a book which 
 Jayne was reading. Herbert paused on the threshold and took off 
 his cap. 
 
 ' Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained 
 you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, that whatsoever ye 
 shall ask the Father in My name He may give it you.' 
 
 It was Jayne who was reading. He looked up when he heard 
 Herbert's footstep in the room, and stopped. 
 
 Herbert came forward, he never knew why he did it, with that 
 pink cheque fluttering in his hand, and laid it upon the open pages 
 of the Book. 
 
 Jayne read it on his knees, and thanked God humbly for it. 
 Brown was too overcome to speak. 
 
 ' Now, who says the days of miracles are over ?' Jayne asked a 
 little later, when he came down over his garret stairs with his 
 commons in his hands — he was going to have breakfast with Brown 
 — and his face shining from that high communion in the upper 
 chamber ; but he wist not, like the prophet of old, that his face 
 shone as he repeated his benediction over the frugal meal. 
 
 Brown had gone down to Geraint's room directly. 
 
 ' God bless you, Geraint !' he said with a quivering lip, and a 
 mist before his eyes that made quite a rainbow of the colours in 
 Geraint's blazer, ' you have saved my life ! Your help is more than 
 gold to me ; it is life and honour ! It has saved me from ghastly 
 trouble — from being hooted out of honourable men's company — 
 from being sent down in disgrace— from breaking my old father's 
 heart— from — from — you must know it, Geraint — from blowing 
 my brains out !' 
 
 Geraint was very much moved by bis broken words, and begged 
 him to say no more. 
 
 'lam very glad to have helped you, Brown,' he said humbly. 
 1 God knows I am ; and I am very sorry that I and my thoughtless 
 habits have been the means of leading you into temptation. I 
 hope some day you will be able to forgive me, Brown !' 
 
 An hour later Jayne limped across KiugV Parade with Brown to 
 
158 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Grinley's rooms. Strange to gay, the bill was in that gentleman's 
 possession, and when he surrendered it to Jayne he remarked 
 that it bore no official mark of having passed through a notary's 
 hands. 
 
 Mr. Grinley was so good as to suggest that the document should 
 be destroyed in the presence of the parties concerned, but Jayne 
 was obdurate, and would not part with the money without it, and 
 Herbert met him limping joyfully across the Great Court with the 
 wretched bit of blue paper that had been the cause of all Brown's 
 trouble in his hand. 
 
 ' I tell you what,' he remarked to Herbert, with that strange 
 light still shining on his worn face, ' I never knew of such a remark- 
 able answer to prayer in all my life. We were on our knees asking 
 for help and direction, and, to strengthen our weak faith, I was 
 reading the promise, when the answer came — swift — sudden — 
 direct ! It was nothing short of a miracle !' 
 
 Late that night, when all the other men on the staircase had 
 gone to bed, Geraint thundered at Herbert's door. 
 
 Herbert was in bed, too, but he got up willingly and let him in. 
 
 ' I've found it all out,' Geraint exclaimed, bursting into his room ; 
 * that villain Grinley was the holder of that accursed bill, and it 
 was he that put the screw on and drove that poor devil, Brown, to 
 the verge of self-destruction.' 
 
 When Herbert lit his lamp, he saw that Geraint had worked 
 himself up to such a pitch of anger that his face was deeply flushed, 
 and the perspiration stood out in great beads on his forehead. 
 
 ' How did you learn it ?' Herbert asked. 
 
 ' Oh, you needn't ask. At Chesterton.' 
 
 ' Did she tell you ?' Herbert's lips did not ask the question, but 
 his eyes did. 
 
 ' Yes,' Geraint said, answering his thought. ' Hebe found out all 
 about it. She knew all along that Grinley had deceived Brown, 
 and led him on ; but she did not know until the other day that he 
 was your friend. There never has been any value received, except 
 that paltry thirty-five pounds he let Brown have, and for which he 
 was charging him fifty pounds a year interest. It was a gross 
 fraud and deception from beginning to end, and to prevent its 
 being found out he proposed to destroy the bill.' 
 
 ' But he didn't,' said Herbert. 
 
 'Luckily he didn't,' said Geraint, lashing himself up by successive 
 stages into a towering passion ; ' we've got to thank Jayne for 
 that. The fellow ought to be horsewhipped ; he's not fit for the 
 society of gentlemen. He ought to be cut by every fellow in 
 Trinity !' 
 
 ' It won't do to make it public,' said Herbert ; ' wel jist considei 
 Brown. However shady it is, for his sake, at any rate, it must not 
 be known.' 
 
 ' The whole business ought to be laid before Grinley's tutor, and 
 
'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: 159 
 
 he ought to be kicked out of King's. If the Provost got scent of 
 it he would. Only to think, that I should have introduced 
 \iim to my friends — that Brown should have met him in my 
 rooms !' 
 
 There may have been another reason, broader and deeper, and 
 underlying these that Geraint bewailed with so much energy, and 
 that made his frank blue eyes blaze like coals of fire beneath his 
 deep brows, but he never mentioned the name of Hebe Bellenden 
 again in the matter. Herbert had never seen Geraint so moved 
 before, and long after he had gone downstairs he heard him talking 
 to himself in the room below. 
 
 There was a meeting held in Geraint's room the following day, 
 £nd Herbert was asked to drop in. 
 
 When he dropped in Cudworth and Harvard were already there. 
 The look with which they greeted him told him that they knew all. 
 Harvard rose np on his entrance and held oat hi 3 great hand. Herbe: t 
 ignored the Cambridge rule that undergraduates should shake hands 
 but twice in each term — once on coming up, and again at going down 
 — and shook hands silently. 
 
 Cudworth came forward and went through the same dumb 
 show. 
 
 Herbert knew exactly what they meant, as if they had spoken 
 volumes. 
 
 ' I knew yesterday, you know,' Harvard explained awkwardly. 
 1 Jayne came over and told me ; but I didn't know whether Brown 
 would care for me to know, so I kept away till Geraint sent for me.' 
 
 Cudworth explained still more modestly. 
 
 ' Fact is,' he said, with a curious moist twinkle in his eye, ' I 
 heard the report, and I guessed there was something wrong with 
 Brown, and I came down ; but when I saw you two fellows 
 blubbering away on each other's shoulders I saw I wasn't wanted, 
 and I crept upstairs again. Best fellow in the world is that fellow 
 Brown, but the most unmitigated ass !' This was added to relieve 
 his feelings . 
 
 As there was no dissentient voice to this last statement, the 
 business of the meeting was resumed. 
 
 Whatever that business was, it made Herbert look very grave, 
 and he declined to have anything to do with it. 
 
 It might be very heroic, and doubtless it would have relieved his 
 feelings, but considering the risks it involved, and thinking of the 
 little mother at home, he felt that it would be heroic no longer, 
 but a very selfish and headstrong piece of folly. 
 
 He thought it right to remind others what risks they were 
 running. They would, at the very least, be sent down if it canue 
 to the ears of their tutor, and it was bound to make a scandal in the 
 'Varsity. 
 
 Geraint pooh-poohed it in his most magnificent manner, and he 
 could afford to do so. It was a matter of indifference to him 
 
t6o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 whether ne stayed up or went down, with that future that he had 
 planned for himself in view. It would only, in any case, hasten the 
 catastrophe he desired ; but with the others it was different. It 
 meant rustication to them if they were found out, and making their 
 friends miserable, and losing a year at their professions, and handi- 
 capping themselves generally at their first start in life. 
 
 Harvard measured the subject all round as he stood propping 
 himself up against G-eraint's wall, with his great hands in his 
 pockets. 'I would rather stand up to him alone, single-handed,' he 
 said, ' in a fair fight ; but the odds would be against him even then. 
 Honesty versus Roguery : rogue must go to the wall. No, hang 
 the risks ! I'm your man. Depend upon it, right'll come uppermost !' 
 
 ' I'm in the same boat,' said Cudworth ; ' we can do without 
 Flowers here. He's done his part splendidly already !' and he 
 looked as if he would like to shake hands with Flowers over again. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE FOUNTAIN OF KING'S. 
 
 • Here they are. Upon them boldly I 
 Double-quick across the grass 1' 
 
 The conspirators did not appear at Hall. Brown, who was un- 
 conscious of the vengeance to be wreaked on his behalf, was quite 
 concerned at Cudworth's absence, as they usually met at the same 
 table. 
 
 Herbert, after the manner of the men of Trinity, ate the best 
 dinner in Cambridge in less than fifteen minutes, and slipped un- 
 noticed out of the hall. 
 
 It was a dark night, though the moon was nearly at the full. 
 Beyond the dark, serried line of King's Chapel there was a ribbon 
 of clear sky. and above that piled -up mountains of clouds, behind 
 which the moon was hidden. There was a melancholy wind 
 moaning round the quadrangle, and a soft mist, it might be of rain, 
 was falling. 
 
 It was not a night to be out in by choice, and the men coming 
 out of Hall drew their gowns around them, and hurried across the 
 court. The great hall was brilliantly lighted, and the light 
 streamed out from the great mullioned windows across the grass ; 
 but the doorway was enveloped in shadow. Still, in spite of 
 the darkness, Herbert saw, or fancied he saw, three dark figures 
 lurking behind a buttress. 
 
 Even as he came up the door opened, and a man came out alone ; 
 the bight of the lamp fell upon his face for a moment before hs 
 emerged into outer darkness. It was Grinley. 
 
 But it was no longer three figures, but four, that were struggling 
 silently on the grass of the court. There was no sound except a 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OF KING'S. 161 
 
 suppressed oath as the struggling figure was hurried across the 
 grass in the direction of the fountain. Herbert saw that he was 
 struggling violently, but ineffectually, in the grasp of the men who 
 were hurrying him along ; and presently there was the sound of a 
 great splash, and he comprehended that they had ducked Mr. 
 Grinley in the fountain of King's. 
 
 There was a fierce oath and a suppressed cry, and the black 
 drenched figure struggled to the brink. Several men who had seen 
 the scuffle hurried with Herbert across the sacred grass to the scene. 
 But before they could attempt a rescue, Geraint's voice rang out 
 clear and stern. ' Again !' 
 
 They seized him again, and again, in the arms of that self- 
 constituted vengeance, the wretched man was plunged beneath the 
 black, icy water of the fountain of King's. 
 
 He rose more dead than alive, and Herbert, with that foolish 
 heart of his, that never could see any living creature suffer, 
 whether friend or foe, came to the rescue, and helped him out of 
 the water. 
 
 Grinley could not stand when he got him to the bank, and he 
 staggered and would have fallen if Herbert had not given him his 
 arm, and led him away, wet and shaking in every limb, from the 
 scene of his just punishment and disgrace. 
 
 Herbert led him back to his rooms with his legs trembling 
 beneath him, and breathing out frightful curses between his blue 
 lips. When he got him indoors, he had to wait on the stairs, half- 
 way up, to recover his breath, and left a dark, dreadful pool behind 
 him where he had been standing. 
 
 He got him up to his rooms presently, faint and sick ; and he 
 reeled into a chair like a drunken man. 
 
 He motioned to Herbert where to find some brandy ; and when 
 he put it to his lips, he heard his great white teeth chatter against 
 the glass. 
 
 ' I know two of the men,' he muttered, between his blue lips, 
 with a dreadful malignity in his eyes, that made Herbert shiver ; 
 1 but I don't know the third.' 
 
 ' He is a friend of Brown's,' Herbert said gravely ; ' they are all 
 friends of Brown's, and, quite without his knowledge, have espoused 
 bis cause.' 
 
 ' They will have to pay for this night's work ; they will have to 
 pay for their friendship !' he muttered savagely, between his 
 shaking teeth. 
 
 His dog was fondling upon him, and licking up the water that 
 fell from his trembling limbs. The dumb creature was as much 
 iistressed and concerned as his master. 
 
 ' They are quite prepared to take the consequences of their act,' 
 Herbert said gravely ; 'nevertheless, for your sake, as well as 
 theirs, I am very sorry it should have happened. Tou did me a 
 kindness once, Mr. Grinley : you saved me from a gambler's fate.' 
 
 11 
 
162 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 He left him, and went down the stairs, and the mendacious cur 
 followed him to the top, and growled a parting anathema after 
 him. 
 
 Quite early the morning following, two of the conspirators in 
 this summary act of vengeance were requested to call upon their 
 tutor. By a curious coincidence Jayne limped across the court at 
 the very moment that they were closeted with Mr. Routh, on an 
 errand of a private nature to the Dean. 
 
 These two gentlemen subsequently discussed the unprecedented 
 occurrence with the gravity befitting the occasion, and the result 
 was that Geraint was requested by Mr. Grinley's tutor to pay a 
 visit to him during the morning at his rooms in King's College. 
 Geraint took certain documentary evidence with him, and, after a 
 rather lengthy interview, had the honour of shaking hands, with 
 unmistakable heartiness, with that urbane and chivalrous-minded 
 gentleman. 
 
 The result of this hand-shaking was ominous to Grinley. His 
 seat was vacant at chapel, and his place was empty in Hall ; and 
 a dreadful rumour ran round the courts that Grinley had been 
 sent down. Not rusticated for a year, but ignominiously sent 
 down. 
 
 All sorts of strange things followed Mr. Grinley's summary dis- 
 missal. The Dean shook hands with Brown in the ante-chapel, 
 and invited him to call upon him in his rooms the following day. 
 The Master, rustling through the Great Court in the stiffest of silk 
 gowns, met Herbert at the door of the Lodge, and carried him in 
 to pay his respects to Mrs. Howell. 
 
 He had not seen that lady for some months. Her kind face was 
 no longer seen in the stalls beneath the organ-loft, and Herbert had 
 heard incidentally that she had been ill. He was not at all pre- 
 pared for the change in her, and he showed on his candid face the 
 shock her changed appearance had given him. 
 
 She gave him her hand — such a thin white hand — and whispered 
 to him as he beat over her sofa : 
 
 ; I know all about it, Mr. Flowers. Thank God you were in 
 time !' 
 
 'You must not excite yourself, my darling,' the Master inter- 
 rupted, laying a strong hand tenderly on her slender wrist. 'I 
 brought him in because I knew you would like to congratulate him, 
 and express our warm approval and thankfulness. He will value 
 it more from you.' 
 
 Mrs. Howell still held Herbert's hand. 
 
 ' You hear what our dear Master says,' she whispered ; her voice 
 was very low and weak, and Herbert had to bend over the couch 
 where she was lying to catch her words. ' I do indeed congratulate 
 you most warmly ; and in the name of bis friends, his father and 
 mother, I thank you, Mr. Flowers !' 
 
 She let go his hand, and lay back on the pillow, and Herbert saw 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OF KING'S. 163 
 
 3 tear stealing from beneath her closed lids, and trickling down her 
 worn face. 
 
 He did not know till then that Lilian Howell was in the room. 
 She came forward softly from behind the couch, and leant over the 
 sofa. 
 
 'Dear aunt,' she said, 'this interview is trying you. Mr. 
 Flowers will come another day.' 
 
 Herbert rose to go, but the sick lady beckoned him to her side ; 
 he looked irresolutely at the Master and at the door, but he shook 
 his head and smiled. 
 
 'You must humour her, Mr. Flowers. Now, my darling, I will 
 give you just five minutes, and then ' 
 
 The Master took out his big gold watch, and held it up to the 
 light. 
 
 ' And then ?' she repeated with that tender, trustful smile that 
 irradiated her lovely worn face like an inner light. ' And then we 
 will say good-bye !' 
 
 Herbert looked from one to the other. The light that shone on 
 her face was reflected back by the Master's, and in that light the 
 great, good, strong face was as tender and soft as a woman's. 
 
 He stood by her side while she spoke to Herbert, with his hand 
 lightly resting on hers. 
 
 ' There was a voice,' she said softly, looking from the Master's 
 face to Herbert's, ' that summoned you. I have heard all about it. 
 Whose was the voice ?' 
 
 She spoke in a hsuhed, reverent tone that brought back to 
 Herbert, all at once, the strange sensation of that eventful night. 
 
 ' I cannot say. It was a familiar voice.' 
 
 ' Very familiar ?' 
 
 'No; not very familiar. A voice I have heard, and should know 
 again.' 
 
 ' You have heard it before ?' 
 
 ' Yes, oh yes ; I am sure I have heard it before.' 
 
 ' Think !' She was very much in earnest, and there was a deep 
 yearning in her bright dark eyes — so very, very bright now against 
 the pallor of her cheeks, as she looked from Herbert to the Master, 
 who was watching every change in her face with such tender wist- 
 ful ness. ' Was it your mother's voice that spoke ?' 
 
 It flashed upon Herbert all at once. 
 
 ' No. Oh no, no ! It was — I am quite sure it was — Brown's 
 poor old father's voice. I can remember it now quite distinctly.' 
 
 ' Oh, thank God, thank God !' exclaimed the poor lady, looking 1 
 up into the Master's face with that wonderful light shining through 
 her tears. 'It was his father's love that saved him. Think, 
 dearest, if love could pierce the veil now what will it do hereafter ? 
 Oh, my darling, my darling ! there will be no real separation !' 
 
 She had forgotten all about Herbert, and was sobbing over the 
 Master's hand. 
 
 11—2 
 
164 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Herbert did not need to look at the watch the Master held up 
 with a warning hand as he crept humbly from the room. Lilian 
 Howell followed him, and closed the door upon the sacred scene. 
 
 ' I am so sorry to see Mrs. Howell so ill,' he said, as he stood 
 with her at the head of the wide staircase. ' I am afraid my visit 
 will have tired her.' 
 
 ' She wished to see you ; she has been talking about you all day. 
 I am glad you have seen her, Mr. Flowers. You will never see 
 her again !' 
 
 She turned from him with a catch in her voice, and her eyes wet 
 with rising tears ; but she did not hold out her hand to him. 
 
 He never saw the Master's wife again ; but he sometimes over- 
 came his natural diffidence to stop Lilian Howell on the chapel 
 steps and ask after the invalid. 
 
 The first time he did so she allowed him to walk with her to the 
 gate of the Lodge. 
 
 ' I cannot tell you.' she said softly, when she had drawn him 
 away from the crowd of men coming out of chapel in the eager, 
 impetuous way in which the men of Trinity return from their 
 devotions ; ' I cannot tell you how much your visit has comforted 
 my aunt. You have cleared up a doubt. You have made the 
 parting easier.' 
 
 She never gave him her hand, but she didn't look above his head 
 now when he met her in the quad ; and once or twice she stopped 
 him, in those dark, dull February mornings, to tell him news of 
 the invalid. 
 
 ' Worse ! Oh, so much worse, Mr. Flowers !' answering the 
 question in his eyes that she had read there all through the 
 service — she had no business to be looking at his eyes. The 
 Prayer-book on the velvet cushion before her was big enough, in 
 all conscience. 
 
 Herbert never failed at morning chapel ; she might come, and 
 he not be there to receive her message. 
 
 Brown used to come to morning chapel, too, after that visit to 
 the Dean. Not that the Trinity Lily was any attraction to him, 
 such a sad, slender white Lily as it had now become, pressed down 
 with the weight of all this sorrow. 
 
 'Nice girl, that !' said Brown one day when his friend had left 
 the Master's niece at the door of the Lodge, as if he had just made 
 a discovery. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert meditatively — 'very !' 
 
 Brown hadn't recovered yet from the cruel agony of Maria's 
 dismissal. The wound was still too raw in that faithful heart for 
 him to set up any other divinity in the empty shrine. The image 
 of the false one was still photographed upon his soul — the other 
 photographs he had been requested to return — and Venus herself 
 would not have had a chance against the poor faithful fellow's 
 tender memory of his lost Maria. 
 
 
THE FOUNTAIN OF KING'S. 165 
 
 It was no wonder that Herbert misinterpreted the object of hia 
 admiration when he remarked to him, as they crossed the Great 
 Court in front of the Lodge one evening after Hall, when the 
 lights were shining in a window that Herbert knew well : 
 
 ' That girl's an angel !' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert, ' no doubt ; but I wouldn't think about her 
 if I were you. There are quite as good fish in the sea. my dear 
 fellow, as ever came out of it. I shouldn't be surprised now if 
 there isn't a wife worth a dozen Marias waiting for you somewhere, 
 Brown.' 
 
 ' I didn't mean her,' said Brown, laying his hand upon his heart 
 as if it were Maria's mausoleum ; ' I meant that angel singing in 
 the stalls. She came up to me in the ante-chapel to-day in the 
 most surprising way, and — and actually asked me to come over and 
 see the Master's wife, who had heard about — about — about thar, 
 night — and wanted to see me. Just fancy her wanting to see me !' 
 
 And Brown's poor, weak, emotional face was quite a sight to see 
 it was working so strangely in the lamplight. 
 
 But Herbert didn't see it ; he was looking up at the window 
 where the light was burning, and at a shadow he knew well that 
 was cast upon the blind. 
 
 ' Did you go ?' he said. 
 
 He was thinking of his own visit and of that gentle sufferer, 
 and of the great sorrow that was hanging over the household at 
 the Lodge. 
 
 ' Yes, certainly. But I didn't know Mrs. Howell was dying. 
 " You must tread softly," she said when we came to the door of 
 the room. If I had known what I now know, I should have 
 taken my shoes from my feet, for if any ground is holy in this 
 world it is thit upper chamber.' 
 
 ' I thought Mrs. Howell was too ill to see anybody,' said Herbert 
 
 He was feeling a little slighted that she hadn't sent for him. 
 
 ' She was much too ill to speak to me, but she took my hand in 
 hers, and made me kneel down beside her bed, while Lilian — she 
 called her Lily — knelt on the other side and asked God to con- 
 secrate the life that He had preserved by such special means to 
 His use and service. I have promised her to work for Him, and 
 not for myself ; to do His will, and not my own, for all the rest 
 of my life. Oh, Flowers, how am I to do it ?' 
 
 4 This is consecration indeed,' said Herbert. 
 
 'Yes, entire consecration,' Brown said softly under his breath. 
 
 ' And you are in earnest for once, Brown ?' Herbert said, as 
 they stopped in front of the Lodge, and looked up at the window 
 from which the light streamed across their path on the grass. 
 
 ' I am indoed ; God knows I am !' said Brown, uncovering his 
 head ; and his weak face looked strong and noble in that clear 
 light. 
 
 ' If there are any angels on earth,' he said softly, with the light 
 
166 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 shining on his face, 'they are in that upper room ; and, God helping 
 me, I will keep my promise to that saint. She is nothing less than 
 a saint, Flowers. She showed me in those few moments, while I 
 knelt beside her bed, with her little transparent hand in mine, that 
 — that I am no longer mine own. His life henceforth — not poor 
 miserable Dick Brown's, who was always breaking his old father's 
 heart, and making his mother and sisters blush for him !' 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 AN UNREASONABLE ATTACHMENT. 
 
 Me. Geinley had gone down. But he had not gone very far. He 
 had only gone to Newmarket, and established himself, and all his 
 aesthetic belongings, in very fine rooms indeed, in that happy 
 hunting-ground of bookmakers and has noirs. 
 
 It was quite sufficiently near for him to drive into Cambridge 
 after dark — he never came in in the daylight — and it was rumoured 
 that he had been frequently seen in the neighbourhood of 
 Chesterton. 
 
 La Maison Bellenden was closed ; at least, for a season. The 
 little innocent ' At Homes ' were at an end ; and when Geraint 
 drove up to the door he was refused admission. The little pink 
 notes ceased suddenly, and a dreadful suspicion racked his mind, 
 that Hebe was a prisoner. 
 
 His suspicions were confirmed before the end of the week. A 
 note, written on the fly-leaf of a book, was brought to his rooms by 
 a lad who delivered milk at the house, and whom Hebe had bribed 
 to be her messenger. 
 
 ' I am so miserable,' she wrote ; ' I am more than miserable — 1 
 am in despair. How can I tell you ? I am to be married to 
 G> inley next week ! He has got a license, and my things are 
 being prepared. It is his way of repaying you for your noble 
 net. 
 
 ' They have found all my letters and — he has read them I I 
 think, if I had a knife, I could kill him. Isabel keeps the keys of 
 all the doors, and she has hidden away all my writing materials. 
 Oh, my darling, what can I do ? He is coming to night. A week 
 hence — unless you prevent it — I shall be his wife !' 
 
 Geraint was like a man possessed after reading this incoherent 
 epistle. He was for doing all sorts of wild things. He would 
 storm the house, and carry off by brute force his imprisoned love* 
 He would challenge Grinley to mortal combat. He would enlisv 
 the strong arm of the law to protect the liberty of the lovely 
 subject. 
 
 Bat he did nothing of the kind. 
 
AN UNREASONABLE ATTACHMENT. 167 
 
 He stumbled his familiar way up the college staircase, and burst 
 into Herbert's room. 
 
 Herbert was sitting by his fireside, with a little black book in h's 
 hand, which didn't look like a classic, though it was the mo ; 
 ancient book in the world ; and when he looked up from it and 
 saw his visitor, he hid it guiltily away on the couch by his side. 
 
 Jayne was sitting with him, and had a similar volume in his hand 
 — a much more bethnmbed, shabby little book ; but he didn't put it 
 behind him. He made room for Geraint by the fire without rising, 
 and he came over and stood between them with his back to the 
 cheerful blaze, and his hands in his pockets. 
 
 His face was clouded, and there were unusual lines of care on his 
 open forehead, and his lips were tightly drawn. Both men looked 
 up at him with surprige. 
 
 ' What's up ?' Herbert asked bluntly. 
 
 'A great deal's up!' Geraint muttered, looking somewhat 
 dubiously over to Jayne. 
 
 ' Oh,' said Jayne, rising hurriedly, ' perhaps I'm in the way. I 
 was going presently. I'll come in again by-and-by, Flowers ;' and 
 he began to limp away to the door. 
 
 'You'll do nothing of the kind,' said Geraint abruptly ; 'sit 
 down, and don't make a fool of yourself, Jayne !' 
 
 Thus politely adjured, Jayne resumed his seat. 
 
 1 The fact is,' said Geraint bitterly, ' it's that infernal scoundrel, 
 Grinley, taking his revenge. And on whom do you think he's 
 taking it ? Not on the men who served him as he deserved to be 
 served, but on a weak, defenceless woman.' 
 
 • On Hebe Bellenden ?' Herbert changed colour involuntarily 
 as he asked the question. 
 
 ' Yes,' he answered with an oath, and grinding his heel into the 
 very tenderest portion of Herbert's worn hearthrug ; ' on Hebe. 
 lie proposes to do her the honour to lead her to the altar within a 
 week, and all the preparations for the wedding are being made.' 
 
 ' And is not the lady willing ?' Jayne inquired with an air of 
 mild interest. 
 
 ' Willing ? The lady hates him like the devil hates holy water !' 
 Geraint replied impatiently. 
 
 ' Why, you surely don't mean that she is being compelled to 
 marry him against her will ?' he inquired in a tone of concern. 
 
 ' It's a thing impossible to explain. There's some confounded 
 conspiracy, and she's the — the unfortunate victim of it.' 
 
 ' Oh !' said Jayne, his face suddenly growing grave, and all the 
 warmth going out of his voice, • oh, I didn't know that people 
 plotted and conspired nowadays ! I didn't know that young ladies 
 could be married against their will. What is the object of the con- 
 spiracy ? Has the — er — young lady vast wealth P 
 
 ' She has not a penny in the world 1' 
 
 1 Connections, perhaps ?' 
 
168 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' She has no connections but blacklegs and card-sharpers,' Geraint 
 replied impatiently. 
 
 'Not a very desirable person, I should think,' said Jayne, 
 shrugging his shoulders with an expressive gesture ; ' not at all a 
 likely person for anyone to plot or conspire about. Are you sure 
 you have got hold of the right end of the story ? Are you sure 
 that the lady has not reasons of her own for — for romancing, we 
 will say ?' 
 
 ' I do not think you understand the situation,' said G-eraint 
 haughtily. ' I do not think you know that I am engaged to marry 
 the lady in question.' 
 
 ' Good heavens my dear fellow ! I'm sure I beg your pardon. 
 Do I understand you that Miss — h'm, Belle — Bellenden — thank 
 you — is being coerced into marrying Mr. Grinley ? That your 
 addresses have been accepted by the — er — young lady herself, and 
 rejected by the young lady's people ?' 
 
 'The young lady hasn't got any people — an elder sister ex- 
 cepted.' 
 
 ' And she is not agreeable to the match ; she does not favour 
 your suit ?' 
 
 ' She has never been asked,' said Geraint grimly. 
 
 ' Oh, I'm afraid I don't understand the situation at all, then,' 
 Jayne said coldly, rising from his seat. 
 
 'I don't think Geraint himself understands it,' said Herbert, 
 looking round from the fire where he was filling his teapot ; ' the 
 fact is, there's a confounded mystery at the bottom of it that he 
 hasn't unravelled yet. Oh, hang it !' 
 
 This last objurgation was addressed to the tea-kettle he was 
 holding, the water from which he had been pouring over his hand 
 instead of into the teapot. 
 
 Jayne came over to the rescue, and took it from him, and 
 Herbert took occasion of the accident to whisper to him : 
 
 ' Stay ! for Heaven's sake, stay ! You may save him yet I Oh, 
 thanks ; it isn't anything to speak of ;' and he turned his attention 
 to pouring out the tea. 
 
 Jayne looked very uncomfortable, and cast a longing glance over 
 at the door, as if he still meditated flight. 
 
 'You must cut some bread and butter, Jayne,' said Herbert, 
 intercepting his glance half-way ; ' a fellow can't do anything with 
 a hand like this ;' and he held up his scalded hand, upon which a 
 fine blister was rising. 
 
 Jayne slid uncomfortably into a seat, and proceeded meekly to 
 cut the bread and butter. 
 
 Geraint was still standing in front of the fire staring gloomily at 
 the opposite wall. 
 
 ' A mystery, you were saying,' said Jayne, nervously returning 
 to the subject. ' Is the mystery connected with the — er — young 
 lady, or with her fiance, Mr. Grinley ?' 
 
AN UNREASONABLE ATTACHMENT. 169 
 
 Geraint winced at the word. 
 
 1 With both,' he said gloomily. 
 
 ' Oh, indeed, and they have not honoured you with their con- 
 fidence ?' 
 
 ' I — I have never asked her,' he answered with a sudden light 
 breaking over his gloomy face, and his frank eyes full of tender, 
 generous trust. ' I have nothing to do with her secrets. If there is 
 anything that — that it is right I should know, she will tell me some 
 day.' 
 
 ' Some day !' 
 
 Herbert repeated the words involuntarily ; he was thinking of 
 that ever-to-be-remembered night, and was asking himself the 
 question, whether, if she were silent, he ought to speak. He 
 remembered his oath, and sighed. 
 
 ' Yes,' Geraint repeated, * some day !' 
 
 His lips were smiling, and all the hard lines had disappeared from 
 bis face. Herbert looked appealingly across the teapot at Jayne, 
 who was growing more and more uncomfortable. 
 
 ' As Miss — Belle — Bellenden — thank you — is an unwilling party 
 to the proposed marriage with our very undesirable acquaintance, 
 Mr. Grinley, I presume that he exercises some unduly-acquired 
 influence over her and her sister in order to bring about the 
 consummation of his wishes.' 
 
 Jayne was very red and dreadfully uncomfortable, and had a 
 horrible conviction that he was taking an unwarrantable liberty. 
 
 'You've about hit the right nail on the head,' Geraint said 
 laconically. 
 
 ' And you do not know the nature of this influence V 
 
 * I have not the remotest idea.' 
 
 ' Don't you think you ought to know ?' said Herbert. 
 
 He could keep silence no longer. He could not see him hurry- 
 ing on to his fate and be silent. 
 
 ' I have perfect confidence in Hebe. Whoever else is guilty, she 
 is innocent. Grinley will have no influence over her when she is 
 my wife.' 
 
 'And you propose to make this lady your wife,' said Jayne 
 nervously ; ' to introduce her into your family with — with this 
 matter, the secret of this man's influence over her, unexplained ?' 
 
 ' That is my intention.' 
 
 Geraint spoke these words very quietly, but with a grave 
 determination in the tone that made his two friends exchange 
 glances across the table. 
 
 ' Have you a mother ? Jayne asked quite inconsequently. 
 
 Geraint nodded his head gravely. 
 
 * And sisters ?' 
 
 Again he nodded assent. 
 
 1 And you propose to introduce to these ledies, into the closest 
 companionship, into the tenderest intimacy, the fiancee of t 
 
J7o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 scoundrel who has been turned out of the University, and witl 
 whom she will carry into the bosom of your family a secret under- 
 
 Stop, for Heaven's sake !' said Geraint. The sweat was 
 standing on his brow in great beads, and his face was painfully 
 flushed. ' I have counted the cost, and — and I am quite prepared 
 to meet it.' 
 
 Herbert groaned, and covered his face with his blistered 
 hand. 
 
 Geraint looked from one to the other. He was touched by the 
 pity and the concern that were too painfully manifest on the faces of 
 the men of whose friendship he was well assured. 
 
 ' I see you will not help me,' he said. 
 
 'Heaven forbid!' said Jayne earnestly. 'Oh, my dear fellow, 
 have you ever known the love of a pure, good woman ?' 
 
 ' I have known the love of the best woman in the world, and I 
 have rejected it for the sake of Hebe Bellenden,' interrupted 
 Geraint bitterly. 
 
 ' God help you ! If you have known this — this beatitude — it is 
 nothing short of it — my poor words will be of no avail. Pause 
 before you take this irrevocable step ; think of the years that lie 
 before you, with — you must bear with me now — with this woman 
 over at your side, who, on your own showing, is neither noble, nor 
 pure-minded, nor unselfish ' 
 
 ' You have no right to assume this,' Geraint interrupted. His 
 face had grown very pale while Jayne was speaking, with a hard, 
 haggard defiance upon it. 
 
 ' I do not assume it ; it is self-evident. If this woman, with all 
 her vices — you must bear with me this once, if I speak plainly,' 
 Jayne continued unmoved — ' were not selfish, cruelly selfish, she 
 would not accept this sacrifice on your part. She will change with 
 the years, as all soulless lower natures change — you must still bear 
 with me — and the days will come when the beauty, or whatever 
 the special allurement may be that you have chosen her for, will 
 drop from her, and she will allure no longer, Think of the barren 
 years — of sickness may be, of sadness must be — when her changed 
 face will ever confront you at your table, will ever sit opposite to you 
 at your hearth ! Think of the innocent heads of your little children 
 on her bosom ; think of their pure lips lisping their infant prayers 
 at her knee. For their sakes, who are not, and who — if she is as 
 you describe her — I pray God may never be — for their sakes, I beg 
 you, I warn you — to pause !' 
 
 Jayne paused, and a mist came before his eyes, and there arose 
 up before him out of the past a face that had been the beacon of 
 his youth. He saw it then, through the mist, as he used to see it 
 once in the choir of a village church, and he heard again the sweet 
 voice singing among the childen — it was singing elsewhere now ; 
 and through heaven's gate — or the halo that Herbert's lamp made, 
 
AN UNREASONABLE ATTACHMENT. 171 
 
 blurred by his foolish tears — he caught a passing glimpse of the 
 angel within it. 
 
 Herbert looked up at Geraint, who was still standing before the 
 fire with that haggard look of settled determination and defiance 
 on his face. It softened visibly as he encountered Herbert's 
 appealing glance. He shook his head sadly, and walked slowly 
 over to the door. 
 
 ' It is very kind of you two fellows to take so much interest in 
 rae,' he said, stopping at the door, and looking back at them with 
 his white lips working strangely. ' Don't think I'm ungrateful or 
 indifferent ; but, God help me ! I have made up my mind, what- 
 ever the end may be, and — I have got to fight it out.' 
 
 He went out and closed the door after him, and they heard his 
 steps echoing drearily down the staircase. 
 
 When he had fairly gone, Herbert could stand it no longer, but 
 poured out the whole story of Geraint's infatuation to Jayne, with 
 all its attendant side-lights of mystery and suspicion. He didn't 
 toll him anything about his own part in that awkward transaction, 
 nor did he refer to that dark night's work, nor to Hebe Bellenden's 
 share in it. 
 
 'I don't; see what we can do for him,' said Herbert ;.' he is 
 wilfully bent on his own destruction.' 
 
 ' You know these — er — ladies ?' said Jayne. 
 
 ' Oh yes ; I know them quite well.' 
 
 ' Ton don't think that — that any appeal to the girl herself would 
 have any effect ?' 
 
 ' Very odd ; but I have been thinking of it.' 
 
 ' If it is to be done, it should be done at once. That poor dear 
 fellow is in such an excited state that he is likely to do something 
 rash. He is quite capable of marrying this Miss Bellenden off- 
 hand.' 
 
 ' I'm afraid that's just what he is goiDg to do. I shall certainly 
 not put my hand out straight to help him ; but I'm not sure that 
 it is not my duty to hold him back.' 
 
 ' I am quite sure it is your duty,' Jayne said earnestly. ' If any 
 representation that you could make to the girl would have any 
 effect — she may have some conscience left, some pity — I am sure, 
 it is your duty to make it.' 
 
 Geraint had gone down to his room with a conviction that all the 
 world was against him, and that he must steer his own course in 
 this affair without the assistance of his friends. 
 
 When Herbert looked in his rooms later on he was smoking a 
 contemplative pipe, with his legs hanging over the back of a chair, 
 and all the clouds cleared away from his handsome frank face. 
 
 ' It's all settled,' he said, taking the pipe out of his mouth and 
 laying his strong right hand on Herbert's ; ' it's all settled ! Con- 
 gratulate me, Flowers — I am to be married on Friday !' 
 
 ' On Friday ?' Herbert repeated, with a Btrange sinking at hia 
 
172 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 heart. He could not congratulate him, but he grasped his hand 
 and pressed it silently. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said gaily ; ' we've outwitted them. I've sent Hebe a 
 golden key that'll open all the doors in La Maison Bellenden. She 
 has only to bribe the servant and slip quietly out when the time 
 comes, and take a ticket for Ely, where I shall join her as soon as 
 the races are over ; and then — and then we shall be married the 
 following day. It is all settled.' 
 
 ' I — I thought you could not communicate with her ?' Herbert 
 stammered. He did not know what else to say. 
 
 Geraint laughed. 
 
 ' Look,' he said, pointing gaily to two notes that lay open before 
 him on the table ; ' I have received these since you and Jayne 
 refused me your valuable assistance. Communication, as the tele- 
 graph people have it, has been restored.' 
 
 He was so elated with his success, and the prospect of his 
 approaching happiness, that this was clearly no time for reasoning 
 with him. 
 
 Herbert left him, and went to bed with a heavy headache. He 
 tossed and tumbled on it during the greater part of the night, 
 falling into a broken sleep full of dreams, and haunted by the 
 accusing face of the man he had carried up that narrow, twisting 
 staircase at St. John's. And when he awoke in the morning 
 Jayne's words were ringing in his ears, ' If any representation that 
 you could make to the girl would have any effect, I am sure it is 
 your duty to make it.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIIL 
 
 THE MISSES BELLENDEN. 
 
 ' Who shall sing of the strife, with a thrill of fervid breath ? 
 There is no such poet in life ; there is, probably, none in death.' 
 
 It was what the boating men with singular unanimity, if not 
 elegance, described as ' a beastly day.' It was the first day of the 
 Lent Races. Dispirited and anxious, after a miserable restless 
 night, Herbert looked out of his window into the gloomy court 
 beneath. A stormy, wet west wind was driving through it, and 
 the white surplices of the men flying across to chapel were blown 
 wildly about like sails of windmills. 
 
 He did not go to chapel, but sat by the fire, which burned reluct- 
 antly, and thought over the thankless task which he had set before 
 him. 
 
 The result of his midnight tremblings and tossings was a deter- 
 mination to make one last effort to save Geraint from the com- 
 mission of that irrevocable act of folly. If any representation 
 that he could make would have any effect with Hebe Bellenden, 
 
THE MISSES BELLENDEN. 173 
 
 he would not have it upon his conscience that he had failed to 
 make it. 
 
 But what representation could he make ? 
 
 He asked himself the question all through his lectures on that 
 dreary February morning. The sound of the Professor's voice was 
 an unusually long way off, and in the place of his rubicund count- 
 enance a ghastly face, only too familiar to Herbert in his dreams, 
 confronted him beneath the Professor's cap. 
 
 Was this the answer to his question ? He revolved it in hia 
 mind as he ran beside his college boat on the bank in the afternoon, 
 on this gloomy first day of the races. Amid all the shouting and 
 halloaing on the bank that question would come uppermost. 
 
 The wind had gone down and the rain had ceased, but the 
 ground was sodden and wet — mud, mud, mud, over ankle and boot 
 — a perfect Slough of Despond. 
 
 There was the usual frantic howling and raving, and twirling of 
 rattles, on the towpath, and everybody got in everybody's way, 
 and Herbert ran and shouted with the men of Trinity until he had 
 no more breath left. Brown ran too, and blew a horn that 
 Geraint had put into his hands. He wasn't a boating man, and he 
 generally blew it at the wrong moment, and when the critical time 
 came he worked himself up into such a breathless state that he 
 looked likely to go off into apoplexy, or explode in some way, any 
 minute. When Herbert remonstrated with him he explained his 
 new-born enthusiasm in a brief sentence, jerked out at painful 
 intervals. 
 
 ' He — asked — me — blow it — wouldn't — stop — blowing — for — 
 world I' 
 
 The Second Trinity did uncommonly well. There were four 
 boats in front, and a nasty bumping boat close behind. However, 
 a close shave round Grassy gave the Second Trinity an advantage, 
 as the boat in front, which was near enough to invite a bump, had 
 gone round the outside bank But the boat behind didn't take a 
 bad Grassy either, and there was tremendous excitement on the 
 bank as the men jostled one another, and shouted at the top of 
 their voices to encourage the champions of their respective 
 colleges. 
 
 ' Pick it up now — you're gaining !' 
 
 'Bravo, Trinity!' 
 
 ' Oh, well rowed, Pembroke !' 
 
 ' You're gaining ! you're gaining !' 
 
 And a deafening shout goes up from the men of Pembroke as 
 they struggle and pant along the bank and get mixed up with the 
 dark blues of Trinity. 
 
 'Well rowed! Put it on ! put it on !' 
 
 Brown blew his horn till he was black in the face, and Herbert 
 shouted ( Look out !' at the very top of his lungs, and the Trinity 
 men made a sudden spurt, and the cox pulled his right string hard 
 
174 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 during a stroke, and sent up a tremendous wash, about the size of 
 an Atlantic wave, which threw the advancing boat back ; then 
 straightening his rudder, he yelled out : 
 
 1 Quicken up !' 
 
 The crowd were all mingled on the bank now, and there was a 
 moment of wild excitement, and the Trinity men were shouting, 
 ' Keep it up ! keep it up !' when there came another cheery shout 
 from the cox : 
 
 ' Easy ! mind your oars.' 
 
 Another moment the Second Trinity was in under the bank, and 
 Pembroke, rowed in splendid style, was racing past it. 
 
 The Second Trinity had made a bump. 
 
 ' Oh, well coxed ; well coxed, Trinity !' 
 
 Herbert helped the imen to land. They were only flesh and 
 blood, though, through long training, their muscles were like steel ; 
 but their hearts were not so perfectly disciplined, and they could 
 not go on pumping at that rate for long, and one of the men 
 fainted. Nevertheless, it was a very neat finish. 
 
 Herbert followed the flag home. He hadn't the heart to give 
 his arm to G-eraint with the purpose that he had in his mind. He 
 walked behind with the crowd, sending up a feeble shout now and 
 then, just to show his patriotism ; while that silly old man Brown 
 was lugging Geraint along, and shouting and blowing that ridi- 
 culous horn of his as if his boat, that he had been so long dreaming 
 about, had been rowed up the Cam and won the race by a length. 
 
 Herbert didn't go to the orgy which was held in Geraint's room 
 later on ; but when Hall was over he put on his thin great-coat 
 under his gown and pressed his cap down over his eyes, and set out 
 to walk through the rain to Chesterton. 
 
 The rain had set in again with renewed violence ; the lamps in 
 the streets and on Magdalene Bridge were shuddering with the 
 fierce gusts of wind and rain that drove up from the open fen 
 country. 
 
 It was very melancholy in the dark streets of Chesterton, and 
 the wind rushing up the river seemed to have an eerie, threatening 
 sound. More than once, Herbert, shivering and drenched to the 
 skin, asked himself what business he had there. More than once 
 he hesitated and turned to go back, but Jayne's words rang in his 
 ears : ' If any representation you could mike would have any effect, 
 I am sure it is your duty to make it.' He had come so far against 
 his inclination, and he went on still against it. 
 
 The entry to the Myrtles was darker than ever, and the house 
 had the appearance of being shut up. There was no light in any 
 of the front windows. Herbert knew the way well ; he had been 
 there on a darker night, and he groped his way up to the entry and 
 rang the bell. The bell had a familiar sound to him as he stood 
 shivering on the doorstep. It seemed to say in its confidential 
 whispering voice : ' Here is a young lambkin coming to be shorn.' 
 
THE MISSES BELLENDEN. 175 
 
 A servant whom Herbert had never seen before opened the door. 
 He inquired for Miss Hebe Bellenden, and was shown into the 
 drawing-room. 
 
 It looked very wretched and bare in the feeble light of one 
 candle. There were no fairy lights now, no rose-coloured lamps, 
 no subtle perfume pervading the darkened chamber, only the faint 
 smell of dead grasses and flowers, and that wretched candle splutter- 
 ing in the socket. 
 
 It was so long before anyone came that he thought it would go 
 out, and the corners where the feeble light refused to penetrate 
 were full of shadows. He didn't mind shadows generally, but 
 shadows here meant quite a different thing, He remembered one 
 in that other room that was heavy as lead when he put his re- 
 luctant hand to it. 
 
 While he was yet thinking of the miserable man who had 
 stumbled across the room, where he now stood, on his last earthly 
 journey, the door opened and Miss Bellenden entered. 
 
 He bowed gravely to her, and said with as firm a voice as he 
 could command — her magnificent presence always took away his 
 courage — that he desired the honour of an interview with her 
 sister, Miss Hebe Bellenden. 
 
 The lady's white brow clouded over, and she looked at Herbert 
 suspiciously beneath her level brows. 
 
 ' My sister is not well enough to receive visitors,' she explained 
 coldly. 
 
 ' She will see me,' said Herbert quietly, ' if you will be so kind as 
 to tell her that my business has reference to that night when — 
 when she honoured me with her confidence.' 
 
 Miss Bellenden's face had grown suddenly white — gray, rather — 
 and her black brows were drawn tightly together. 
 
 ' Whatever you have to say to my sister with reference to that 
 unfortunate night can be said as well to me,' she said coldly ; but 
 Herbert thought her firm voice trembled. 
 
 ' My errand,' Herbert said, with a quiet determination in his 
 voice and manner that he never knew he possessed before, ' is to 
 Miss Hebe Bellenden. If she declines to see me, I must intrust 
 my message to another party.' 
 
 He had not intended any threat, and he was not prepared for the 
 sudden anger that blazed up in the lady's eyes. 
 
 ' There is no necessity for the interference of a third party, Mr. 
 Flowers,' she said haughtily. ' The subject you refer to is quite 
 done with. It was a mere accident ; the man would have died 
 anywhere — in the street, maybe. We are simply under the obliga- 
 tion to you of removing the — the body. It saved the unpleasant- 
 ness of our names appearing in the inquiry. The subject can have 
 no possible interest to my sister.' 
 
 Her dark eyes and her white face seemed to glitter with 
 -suppressed fear or anger, like baleful lightning, as she stood 
 
176 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 speaking to Herbert in the uncertain light of the candle flickerin^- 
 low in the socket. 
 
 ' Do I understand you,' he said quietly, turning his drenched caj 
 in his hand, as if he were on the point of going — ' do I understand 
 you that you decline to allow me an interview with your sister ?' 
 
 1 1 decline to have my sister mixed up with the transactions of that 
 unfortunate night to which you have been so considerate as to refer.' 
 
 ' Then I must seek the intervention of a third party,' said 
 Herbert, bowing gravely, and walking over to the door. 
 
 ' Stop !' said the woman, before he got to the door. The candle 
 had burnt so low that he could not see her face, but her voice was 
 low with suppressed passion. ' I will see if Hebe can see you. I am 
 sorry that I am mistaken in you, Mr. Flowers. I thought you 
 were a gentleman !' And with this Parthian thrust she swept out 
 of the room. 
 
 It was several minutes — hours it seemed to Herbert — before the 
 door again opened, and Hebe Bellenden came in ; and all the while 
 the candle had been flickering in the socket, throwing threatening 
 shadows on wall and ceiling. 
 
 She came straight up to him, with an eager, impulsive movement. 
 He heard the rustle of her dress on the floor, and he felt the 
 faint sweet odour of that subtle perfume that she brought with her. 
 before, by that uncertain light, he could see her face. 
 
 She was paler than usual, for there was no rouge on her cheeks 
 and no false shadows beneath her eyes ; but her face was more 
 natural and girlish than he had ever seen it before. 
 
 ' Have you come from Geraint ?' 
 
 She asked the question, and answered it with her eyes. He saw 
 her face fall and whiten as her beautiful speaking eyes looked 
 eagerly up into his with that tender question, and droop beneath 
 the answer they read there. Evidently Miss Bellenden had not 
 informed her of the nature of Herbert's errand. 
 
 ' To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit, Mr. Flowers?' 
 she said, nervously twisting her fair hands together, and not offering 
 one to Herbert. 
 
 ' I — I am come to ask you to release me from a promise — an oath 
 that I made under very exceptional circumstances,' Herbert said, 
 speaking in a low voice, for he had an impression that he heard 
 the latch of the door click after Hebe Bellenden had closed it. 
 
 He could not see her face, as the shadows were deepening in the 
 room, but he hardly recognised her voice when she spoke. 
 
 'You — you want to tell him /' she said, or rather gasped. 
 
 ' I want to be released from my promise,' Herbert continued, not 
 noticing the interruption. ' Your sister has been so good as to 
 enter into some explanations ; and I gather from her that it is no 
 longer of any moment to you that your part in the — the unhappy 
 transaction should be kept secret ; and I therefore beg you to release 
 me.' 
 
THE MISSES BELLENDEN. 177 
 
 He was prepared for a good deal in that honse, but he was not 
 prepared for Hebe Bellenden throwing herself on a conch and 
 beginning to sob hysterically. 
 
 I My part ! my part ! O God ! my part !' she sobbed. ' Do you 
 know what my part was, Mr. Flowers ? Do you know what you ask?' 
 
 I I know why I ask it,' Herbert said sadly, moved with a strange 
 pity by her distress. ' Geraint is my dearest friend — and — he will 
 shortly be your husband. If you do not tell him what happened 
 on that night, I must.' 
 
 ' I tell him ? Are you mad ? Do you know how honourable, 
 how blameless he is ? Do you know that he would loathe me — he 
 would shrink from my touch — he would never look upon my face 
 again ? And you ask me to tell bim !' 
 
 ' It is better — it is far better that he should learn it from your 
 lips,' said Herbert huskily. He was more moved by her distress 
 than he could tell. 'He must learn it before — before the 
 knowledge will be of no avail ; — and it is better that he should 
 learn it from you than from me.' 
 
 ' From you ? Then you would betray me ?' 
 
 ' I have come to ask you to release me from the promise you 
 exacted from me on that night.' 
 
 ' Oath !' she said hastily, interrupting him. 
 
 1 Oath/ he repeated calmly ; ' I am not more bound by that than 
 by my verbal promise. Will you release me ?' 
 
 ' I will never release you !' she said passionately. 
 
 1 Then I warn you, that unless you spare me that most miserable 
 duty, unless, before you take his honourable name, you tell him 
 everything that occurred on that memorable night, I shall feel 
 it my duty, in spite of the hasty oath — the promise given in 
 ignorance — -to tell him all.' 
 
 ' I will make it impossible for you to tell him. I will lay it upon 
 your honour !' she answered passionately. 
 
 He could not see her face, for the light was flickering in the 
 socket, and weird, fantastic shadows were gathering around. 
 
 'I must ask you to spare me,' he said hurriedly. He wanted no 
 more confessions. ' Oh, if you knew how intolerable this secret is 
 to me !' 
 
 ' I will make it more intolerable !' she exclaimed. ' I will make 
 it impossible for you to tell him. Do you know what my share in 
 that night's work was ?' 
 
 ' No !' he answered, almost fiercely ; ' and I do not want to 
 know !' 
 
 ' But you shall know ; you shall know it upon your honour, and 
 carry the secret with you to your grave. 1 murdered that man /' 
 
 Herbert could not have spoken a word to save his life. He stood 
 with his hand on a chair-back, and crushing that limp rag of a cap 
 in his hand, and as the light leaped up a shadow more fearful than 
 the rest seemed closing in around him. 
 
 12 
 
178 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' Do you want to know why I murdered him ?' Hebe Bellenden 
 continued in the same hard, strained voice. 
 
 She had risen from the couch, and was standing beside Herbert, 
 and had laid her hand upon his arm. He shrank from her touch 
 with unutterable repugnance, and drew his arm away. 
 
 ' I killed him because he found me out ! He had caught me 
 cheating him at cards. I had won his money, and he followed me 
 out of the room with a relentless purpose in his eyes. He had no 
 pity. He had no scruples. He was ready for any scene. He 
 would have made an exposure before all those. And I — his 
 miserable faint heart failed him when he was threatening me — and 
 he sank into a chair — and — and I gave him some chloroform. I 
 did not intend to kill him, only to silence him for a time, till the 
 other men should go. But he was dead, quite dead, when the rest 
 came in — and — and you carried him back to his college.' 
 
 ' And Grinley ?' said Herbert hoarsely. 
 
 ' Oh, Grinley had no more to do with it than you had ; but the 
 power that this horrible secret gives him he holds over my head, 
 and I am his slave, his tool. But for Geraint, I should be his wife.' 
 
 All the passion had gone out of her voice, and it was tremulous 
 and tender as she softly whispered Geraint's name. 
 
 The sound of his name on her lips gave Herbert courage to speak. 
 
 ' Oh, why did you tell me all this ?' he asked. 
 
 ' Why ? Because I trust in your honour. If I tell you the 
 whole truth, and throw myself on your honour— your stainless, 
 chivalrous honour, as a man, as a gentleman — you may despise 
 me, but you will not betray me !' 
 
 * Have you no mercy ?' said Herbert bitterly. 
 
 The nickering light had ceased to flicker, and was settling down 
 in its socket, and the weird shadows had resolved themselves into a 
 settled gloom. 
 
 ' You tell me this cruel secret, and you seal my lips. Have yoa 
 no mercy on me ? have you no mercy on him ? Do you know what 
 he is sacrificing for you ?' 
 
 ' No,' she said eagerly. ' He is too generous to tell me. You may 
 trust me. I will never betray your confidence. It is but right 
 that I should know.' 
 
 Herbert paused ; he could not see her in the gloom, but the 
 subtle perfume of her presence was near him, was stifling him, was 
 intolerably abhorrent to him, and he shrank away from her with a 
 repugnance that the gloom only partly concealed. 
 
 Should he speak ? 
 
 ' If any representation that you could make would be of any 
 avail, I am sure it is your duty to make it.' 
 
 Jayne's voice and Jayne's words were ringing in his ears. 
 
 'If I tell you,' he said, speaking slowly and thickly, and with a 
 desperate earnestness, ' that he is giving up his friends, his family, 
 bis prospects — bis splendid prospects — a great position, a useful, 
 
THE MISSES BELLENDEN. B79 
 
 honourable career, wealth, power, fame, and, above all, the love of 
 the best and noblest woman in the world ' 
 
 ' Ah !' she said, interrupting him with bated breath ; ' do you say, 
 truly, that he is giving up all this for me ? On your honour ?' 
 
 'On my honour !' 
 
 'Oh, my darling, my darling ! How can I repay you ?' 
 
 She was talking to herself. She had altogether forgotten 
 Herbert's presence. 
 
 ' How ?' he exclaimed eagerly, interrupting her. ' How ? Oh, 
 Miss Bellenden 1 I know you can be noble, be generous ; have 
 pity upon him 1 Show your love to him by ' 
 
 ' By giving him up ?' she interrupted fiercely. ' I might have 
 done so if — if you had not told me all — if you had not told me of 
 the woman whose love he had rejected. No ; I will not give him 
 up to her !' 
 
 ' Oh, cruel, cruel love ; crueller than hate !' Herbert had in his 
 mind to say, but he didn't say it. He only said feebly, hopelessly : 
 1 But you will never marry him without telling him what you have 
 told me, Miss Bellenden ?' 
 
 ' I will never tell him what I have told you ; and you, if I know 
 you aright, will never tell him. And I will certainly marry him !' 
 
 A low, stifled cry escaped Herbert. He involuntarily measured 
 all women by a standard that he had set up in his own mind. It 
 was a very low standard measured by linear inches. The little 
 mother was no height to speak of, but Hebe Bellenden fell im- 
 measurably short of it. 
 
 There was no purpose to be gained in prolonging the interview. 
 He had made the only representation that he could make, and it 
 had failed. Clearly there was nothing further to do. 
 
 4 1 am very sorry,' he said, speaking huskily, for he was deeply 
 moved ; ' I am sorry for him, and I am sorry for you. God grant 
 that you may never have cause to regret this cruel, wilful act !' 
 
 The dying flame shot suddenly up in the socket, and in that 
 momentary light he saw Hebe Bellenden's ghastly face, and a 
 weird awful shadow closing around her as the light went slowly 
 out. The room was in perfect darkness, and he groped his way 
 over to the door. She did not speak, or seek to detain him, and 
 vhen he went out into the gloomy night, the wind and the rain 
 
 ily intensified the thick black darkness that he had left behind. 
 
 12—3 
 
i8o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE LENT RACES. 
 
 * Drink to (Second) Trinity's conquering boat — 
 The best piece of timber that e'er was afloat 1 
 Drink to the men who, so trusty and strong, 
 'Midst danger and treachery, pulled her along, 
 As Englishmen should, to the head of the river ! 
 Drink to our boat, and three hearty cheers give her !' 
 
 The Second Trinity had done splendidly every day of the Lent 
 Races. Its success was almost unparalleled. It had gone up a 
 place every night, and one night it had made a quite unexpected 
 bump. 
 
 The performance had been altogether phenomenal ; the success of 
 the college boat had caused a feeling of intense satisfaction through- 
 out Trinity, and the thanks of the college had been gratefully and 
 enthusiastically awarded to the crew and the coach, and especially 
 to the cox for his skilful and plucky steering. 
 
 It was the eve of the last race, and the Second Trinity had 
 repeated and eclipsed the performance of the previous nights, and 
 was second on the river. The excitement, or the exertion of the 
 last bump, was too much for one of the crew, and for the second 
 time during the races he had fainted on coming to the bank. This 
 time the collapse was more serious, and it was some time before he 
 could be brought round, and he had to be driven back to his college 
 while his colleagues followed the flagback in triumph. 
 
 Brown, who had panted gallantly on foot beside the boat every 
 night of the races, and awoke the echoes with fiendish yells when- 
 ever he had breath enough to spare, had roared and yelled himself 
 by this timequite hoarse and voiceless. He had already sacrificed, 
 independent of his lungs, on the altar of friendship, two rattles. 
 The horn had proved useless after the first night, as he had no 
 breath left to blow it, and there remained nothing but a dinner- 
 bell wherewith to display his unabated patriotism. 
 
 He walked back with Herbert and G-eraint behind the flag across 
 Midsummer Common. The hero was between them, unusually 
 silent and calm, in the midst of all that noisy demonstration. The 
 heroes of the day, with the little cox on their shoulders, were es- 
 corted back to their college amid the enthusiastic shouts of their 
 friends and the congratulations and applause of their many 
 admirers, who accorded them every now and again a frantic cheer. 
 
 Everybody had stopped work for the day, and the banks of the 
 Cam and the meadows were crowded with people. The bright 
 colours of the college blazers, the scarlet of Lady Margaret (as the 
 boat-club of St. John's delights to call itself), the light blue of 
 
 
THE LENT RACES. 181 
 
 Pembroke, the dark blue of Trinity, the red and black of Jesus, the 
 wasp-like hues of Clare, and the endless variety of stripes, gave a 
 lively colour to the moving masses, and conveyed a cheerful im- 
 pression to the usually sombre landscape. There was a rosy flush 
 in the sky, which was serene and beautiful. The clouds which had 
 veiled it for so many days had parted and cleared away, and only 
 the distant mountain-tops of storms that had spent themselves lay 
 at peace on the tranquil breadth of the horizon. 
 
 The river reflected back the living picture : the flushed rosy sky, 
 the animated processions of the brilliant parti-coloured crews, tho 
 holiday crowd, the green fields, the clumps of trees in the distance, 
 the rooks overhead cawing their harsh chorus to the song that a 
 Thousand lusty young voices were shouting beneath : ' For he's a 
 jolly good fellow !' 
 
 Brown couldn't sing, for he was as hoarse as a raven ; but he 
 broke out every now and then into a frantic ' Hooray !' 
 
 Herbert was silent ; he had no heart for singing ; he was thinking 
 of what the morrow would bring. 
 
 Geraint understood his silence, but he made no reference to it. 
 As they came nearer the town the steeples of the many churches 
 seemed to emerge from the mist, where they had been hidden so 
 many days, and came out to meet them ; the children came but of 
 cottage doors to see them pass, and little fluttering girl-graduates 
 scurried timidly away out of their path, and watched them with 
 their bright eyes from a distance. 
 
 Before they left the common the crowd struck up ' Auld Lang 
 Syne,' and the men joined hands in the hearty chorus as they 
 streamed in ragged, uneven lines across the grass. 
 
 Geraint grasped a hand of each of his friends, and a mist came 
 before his eyes, as the familiar words rose lustily on every lip. 
 Should he ever grasp these hands again in love and friendship ? 
 To-morrow he would be a wanderer — wilfully exiled from these 
 associations of his youth. With these reflections in his mind the 
 friendly grip of his hand may have been unconsciously warmer, and 
 the men returned it with equal warmth, and the eyes of that silly 
 old man, Brown, were full of tears. There was a suspicious catch 
 in Herbert's voice as he bellowed out in his fine bass the old words 
 that he used to sing on speech-days at school : 
 
 ' For Auld Lang Syne, 
 We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet, 
 For Auld Lang Syne I' 
 
 There was a bump supper and an enthusiastic meeting in 
 Geraint's rooms, finishing up with a torchlight procession round the 
 Great Court. Even Jayne limped round with them, though he 
 didn't join the orgy. 
 
 It was a very quiet night. The moon was large and bright as it 
 rose above the battlements of Trinity, and the stars had come out in 
 
182 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 their millions. The night was so quiet that the echoes still lingered 
 in the old cloisters long after the footsteps had ceased. 
 
 ' Hark ! What is that ?' Geraint asked as they paused under the 
 arch of Neville's Court. 
 
 They had stayed behind the rest of the crowd to enjoy the beauty 
 cf the night — their last night. 
 
 ' What ?' said Herbert ; ' I heard nothing except the fellows 
 shouting.' 
 
 ' That knocking, like nails driven into a coffin. There it is again !' 
 
 A sharp repeated knock broke the silence of the court from the 
 apparently deserted cloister. 
 
 ' Oh, it is only someone doing the knocker trick.' 
 
 ' I don't think so. I have done it myself a hundred times, but 
 never in that way.' 
 
 They passed into Neville's Court, and walked round it in that 
 moonlight. 
 
 ' I've got my exeat,' said Geraint presently, breaking the silence ; 
 ' it's all arranged. I shall go away from here directly after the 
 race. I am so glad and proud that we have done so well. I shall 
 be proud of it all my life. Whether I shall ever come back, God 
 knows !' 
 
 'It will depend upon your father's forgiveness,' Herbert was 
 going to say, but he paused and substituted ' acceptance of the 
 situation.' 
 
 ' Exactly,' Geraint said meditatively. ' I am sorry to have dis- 
 appointed him. He was the best and kindest father in the world. 
 There has always been such confidence between us until now. He 
 trusted me so completely ; the blow will be only the greater.' 
 
 He stopped suddenly, and his lip trembled for a moment. 
 Herbert, remembering that awful confession of Hebe Bellenden's, 
 made a last appeal. 
 
 ' Oh, Geraint,' he said brokenly, ' the time has not gone by ; it is 
 not too late !' 
 
 A smile crossed his frank face as he turned his eyes on Herbert, 
 in the moonlight, with a trustful look as if he knew that he would 
 not misunderstand him. 
 
 ' My dear fellow/ he said, ' I thank God it is too late !' 
 
 There was nothing more to be said, and Herbert walked by his 
 side until they reached his staircase. They parted at the foot with 
 a brief ' Good-night,' and Geraint went into his room and closed 
 his oak with a bang. 
 
 Herbert didn't go straight to his own rooms, though the hour 
 was so late, and all the lights on the staircase were out. He 
 stumbled up the steep stairs as best he could, and found his way 
 into Jayne's room. He had not gone to bed, and Brown was 
 there. 
 
 There was a gloomy look on Herbert's face when he entered 
 which they both remarked. Jayne made room for him at the fire. 
 
THE LENT RACES. 183 
 
 He had already heard of the failure of Herbert's mission, but 
 he had not learned the dreadful secret that Hebe Bellenden had 
 charged him with. 
 
 ' You are in trouble about G-eraint ?' he inquired anxiously. 
 
 Herbert nodded. 
 
 'Can nothing be done for him ?' he asked presently, looking 
 straight into Herbert's face with the light of a smile on his dark 
 plain features. 
 
 ' Nothing !' said Herbert moodily. 
 
 ' Nothing ? Couldn't we pray for him ?' 
 
 Herbert hadn't thought of that, except in a private way, when 
 his oak was sported, and that inner door closed, and he was shiver- 
 ing on that little worn bit of carpet before he got into bed. 
 
 ' You are always right, Jayne,' he said awkwardly, ' but I'm 
 afraid it is too late.' 
 
 1 Dear me !' Jayne answered with a look of concern ; ' and is the 
 arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 ' No ; I didn't mean that. I meant that to-morrow it will be all 
 over.' 
 
 ' All the more reason why we should ask His intercession to- 
 night. You know that passage in the glorious Catholic Epistle of 
 St. James, " Pray for one another, that ye may be healed." Let 
 us pray for our poor brother who is sick and distraught in mind, 
 that the Lord's hand may be stretched out to save him, even as by 
 fire.' 
 
 Suiting the action to the word, Jayne went down on his knees, 
 and the two men turned their faces to the backs of their chairs, 
 and knelt down beside them. 
 
 He poured out his simple soul before the great Arbitrator of the 
 destinies of men, and begged, if it were possible, that this tempta- 
 tion that had overcome their poor misguided friend should be re- 
 moved from him, or that with the temptation there should be a 
 way of escape made plain to him. 
 
 The men all arose from their knees saddened and subdued, and 
 parted silently. 
 
 When Herbert got down to his room the fire was out, and hia 
 lamp was burning low. He had not been in his room a minute 
 before he heard a footstep in the passage without, and Geraint 
 opened the door. 
 
 ' Oh,' he said — he was looking strangely moved, and his voice 
 was not so steady as usual ; ' I have been up here before, and you 
 were out. Did you happen to see a white bird, a stray pigeon or a 
 dove, I expect, fluttering about the staircase ?' 
 
 1 No,' said Herbert ; ' I have just come down from Jayne's 
 rooms ; I should have seen it if it had been there.' 
 
 ' Oh, it was there just now ; it came up the staircase before me. 
 I heard the flapping of its wings. If I were superstitious, now, I 
 should say it was a warning. There is a legend in our family, in 
 
184 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 the absence of a respectable family ghost, of a white dove ap- 
 pearing on the eve of any tragical event. But I am quite sure 
 this thing was real ; I have opened the door below to let it fly 
 out.' 
 
 4 1 am sure the event of to-morrow will be tragical enough,' said 
 Herbert gloomily. 
 
 Geraint looked at him with the light of a Bmile on his lip, but 
 his face was quite serious, almost grave. 
 
 ' Do you know,' he said, looking steadfastly at Herbert, ' that we 
 tried the divination trick with Virgil to-night, to find out what 
 would be the fortune of the boat to-morrow, and we came upon a 
 strange passage ? " Nunc augur Apollo, nunc Lycice sortes, nunc et 
 Jove missus ab ipso interpres divom fert horrida iussaper auras.' 
 How do you read it ?' 
 
 ' I shouldn't attempt to read it at all,' said Herbert ; ' I don't like 
 that kind of tampering with forbidden mysteries ; it's like tempt- 
 ing Providence. I should go to bed, if I were you, or you'll never 
 get the boat up another place to-morrow.' 
 
 ' All right,' said Geraint, still with that smile on his lip, and his 
 face grave and earnest. ' I want you to take charge of this till to- 
 morrow night ; and — and — if anything happens to me, I want you 
 to promise to burn it unopened.' 
 
 He laid a small packet neatly tied up and sealed on the table as 
 he spoke. 
 
 'My dear fellow,' Herbert exclaimed, 'what can happen ? You're 
 nervous and overwrought to-night — I don't wonder at it 1 You'll 
 be all right in the morning.' 
 
 Geraint's lips still smiled. 
 
 ' You'll promise me ?' he said quietly, putting the packet in 
 Herbert's hand, ' and you'll lock it up — until ' 
 
 'Until you ask for it again,' interrupted Herbert cheerfully. 
 ' All right, old fellow ; I'll promise you.' 
 
 Herbert didn't go to chapel the next morning ; in fact, very few 
 men of Trinity did go to chapel, and the Dean, and the Scholar 
 who read the lessons, had the service pretty much to themselves. 
 
 The crew of the Second Trinity breakfasted together in the 
 rooms of the cox, and Herbert met Spurway in the court as the 
 men were coming out. 
 
 'I say,' he called out to Herbert across the grass, 'do you want 
 to row to-day ? Five's knocked up, and cox is going to ask you to 
 take his place.' 
 
 ' I'm very sorry,' said Herbert ; ' I don't think Johnson could 
 stand another day ; but I haven't been practising lately. Isn't 
 there another fellow they could ask ?' 
 
 ' Oh yes ; they could ask me. I trained for it, you know ; but 
 your weight's better. It's a mere question of weight. If you 
 refuse they will ask me.' 
 
 Herbert smiled grimly. He remembered Spurway's perform- 
 
THE LENT RACES. 185 
 
 ahce at the previous Lent Races, and how the boat went down 
 with persistent ill-fortune a place every night. 
 
 ' All right,' he said, ignoring the other's obliging suggestion ; 
 ' but they haven't asked me yet. If they do I shall most certainly 
 accept.' 
 
 And Spurway confounded the beggar's impudence the whole 
 length of the Great Court. 
 
 Herbert's heart was bumping beneath his purple gown with 
 excitement. Would they really ask him ? 
 
 The question was set at rest by the cox himself, who met him at 
 the foot of his staircase. 
 
 ' Hullo !' said the cox ; ' I was just coming to ask you to pull in 
 the race to-night. Johnson's quite knocked up. I think you're 
 about his weight.' 
 
 ' Not quite,' said Herbert modestly. ' Geraint is ; I'm afraid 
 I'm hardly heavy enough.' 
 
 ' Oh, then you can change places.' 
 
 Then Herbert, blushing like a girl, pleaded that he hadn't 
 trained, and that he was sure there were much better men they 
 could pick out ; but all his objections were overruled, and to his 
 great and hardly concealed delight the whole thing was settled. 
 
 Herbert never spent such a proud day, and never, surely, such a 
 long day in his life. He was too excited to go to lectures, and he 
 couldn't read, and he wandered about in a feverish, excited state 
 until it was time to go down to the boats. 
 
 Geraint, perhaps, was the coolest of all the crew of the Second 
 Trinity. He rose early, while Herbert was still in bed, and went 
 to chapel — his last college chapel. Jayne met him there, and they 
 walked back to their rooms together. 
 
 After the breakfast he had some things to do in his room, laying 
 out the things for his gyp to pack ; and when Herbert joined him, 
 after the early dinner of the crew, he pointed with pride to the 
 portmanteaus lying ready strapped on the floor. 
 
 ' There,' he said cheerfully. ' Now I think everything is ready.' 
 
 All the gloomy forebodiugs of the previous night had passed 
 away, anu he was in the highest spirits. He paused and looked 
 round his old college room when he got to the door, with a half- 
 regretful smile, as if he were taking leave of it. 
 
 1 3fou will come back here ?' said Herbert in a tone of concern. 
 
 ' Oh yes ; I shall come back here to change. I shall slip out 
 quietly without saying any good-byes — you must say them all for 
 me, Flowers — and tell that old man, Brown, not to bother about 
 that wretched money. The satisfaction it gave me to duck that 
 fellow Grinley was worth double the amount. And now I am 
 going to pay him off a little score of my own. I am going to cany 
 Hebe off from under his very eyes. By this time to-morrow she 
 will be my wife 1' 
 
 3e smiled his old tender smile as he softly repeated the last 
 
1 86 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 word with something of the chivalrous ardour of a knight of old. 
 But Herbert sighed and hung his head, and Jayne's question rang in 
 his ears, ' Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 ' To-morrow ?' he repeated. 
 
 ' Yes, I have got the license already, so there will be no delay. 
 She will wait for me at Ely. She has started now' — again that 
 tender, shining smile lit up his face — ' and we shall go up by the 
 night express — this will put them off the scent — and be married in 
 London at eight o'clock to-morrow, and start at once for Paris.' 
 
 There was no more time for talking, for the bank was crowded 
 with men, and they were none too early. The punts and ferries 
 were plying rapidly backwards and forwards carrying the men 
 across to the other side, and the meadows were crowded with spec- 
 tators. There was great excitement, for it was rumoured that 
 there had been a change in the crew of the Second Trinity, and 
 that she wouldn't hold her own this last night of the races. All 
 the excitement and enthusiasm seemed to centre round the two first 
 boats. The crew of Lady Margaret glared at the crew of Second 
 Trinity, not exactly with scorn or fiendish animosity on their frank 
 young faces, but with a superior ' don't-think-much-of-your-boat ' 
 expression that was very trying, to say the least of it, to the crew 
 of the Second Trinity. 
 
 While the crews were removing all unnecessary clothing, Jayne 
 limped up to the bank ; he had just crossed over by the ferry. 
 
 Geraint nodded to him heartily, and Herbert, looking up and 
 seeing the mild astonishment on his kind face — he hadn't had a 
 chance of telling him of the change in the crews — blushed 
 furiously. 
 
 1 God bless you !' said Jayne, waving his hand. 
 
 They couldn't hear him, but his simple benediction didn't do 
 them any harm. 
 
 ' Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' Herbert seemed to hear in 
 the shout that arose on the bank as the boat started. 
 
 They rowed down with long sweeping strokes, easing as they 
 passed Ditton Corner, and pausing a little to be admired as they 
 passed the Rectory Meadow, which was crowded with ladies. They 
 didn't see Brown until they reached the starting-point. He had 
 gone down quietly before them, and was already there, so as to be 
 able to run with the boat. He came down the bank and stood 
 above his boots in the water, and went through a great amount of 
 dumb-show expressive of his tremendous patriotism, and displayed 
 an enormous dinner-bell or railway-bell, that he had provided for 
 emergencies. 
 
 The race had created tremendous excitement throughout the 
 'Varsity. It was not the fate of the Second Trinity that men 
 were interested in ; it was the struggle for the first place on the 
 river. 
 
 There came by-and-by a moment of breathless excitement, when 
 
THE LENT RACES, 187 
 
 everybody was craning his neck, and the men -were waiting, 
 stretching forward ready for the signal to start. It was quite a 
 solemn moment to the spectators on the bank, but what was it to 
 Herbert ? His heart wasn't exactly in his mouth, but it was 
 thumping away at his side, and he was trembling all over. He 
 thought in that supreme moment of the little mother, and in the 
 hush that had fallen over all the noisy crowd in that breathless 
 moment, he seemed to hear Jayne's voice saying, ' Is the arm of the 
 Lord shortened ?' 
 
 Bang ! 
 
 Before the sound reached them, with the flash of the starting gun, 
 the cox had dropped the chain, and there was a crash on the water 
 of the oars striking it at the same moment, and the boat, bike a 
 living thing, leaped forward. 
 
 In a moment, from breathless silence, there was a scene of mad 
 excitement. A tremendous cheer went up ; then ensued a general 
 rushing and shouting, a springing of rattles, a ringing of bells. 
 The crowds on the bank scatter, the men running in wild, surging 
 groups on the towing-path beside their boats, yelling frantically the 
 while, as if just let loose from Hanwell. 
 
 The coach of the Second Trinity rode in advance of the throng 
 to clear the way, while the men panted gallantly on foot, waking 
 the echoes with fiendish yells. 
 
 ' Well pulled all !' 
 
 ♦Bravo, Trinity!' 
 
 Lady Margaret started beautifully, thirty-seven strokes a minute 
 to Second Trinity's thirty-five, while the boat behind, Emmanuel, 
 that had gone down the previous night, was slowly gaining on them, 
 and evidently meant to regain the place she had lost. 
 
 Herbert wasn't a bit nervous now. His heart had ceased 
 bumping, except from the exertion ; but amid all the hurly-burly 
 on the bank, the thousand faces turned upon the boat, the thousand 
 voices raised in deafening shouts, he saw but one face smiling upon 
 him — the face of the little mother. He heard but one voice — the 
 voice of Jayne : 
 
 ' Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 And Geraint ? Perhaps the hurly-burly best suited his mood. 
 Every faculty was brought into play. His stroke was glorious ; the 
 muscles of his magnificent limbs seemed steel. What a splendid 
 giant he was ! — his frank, handsome face flushed with the exertion 
 — a very monarch of youth, and health, and manly beauty in the 
 heyday of his strength ! 
 
 Emmanuel was certainly gaining. Jack Harvard rowed five, and 
 the strength of his stroke showed that the American climate has 
 not an injurious effect on a man's muscles. The Emmanuel stroke 
 pulled magnificently, and at Grassy it was allowed that Emmanuel 
 had gained a length. 
 
 ' Pick her up, Emmanuel ! Well rowed ! — put it on !' came a 
 
1 88 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 shout from the bank. ' You're gaining every stroke ! Bravo t 
 Emmanuel !' 
 
 Herbert glanced nervously up at the cox, but the cox had no eyes 
 for anything that was behind him. His well- trained eye had 
 detected what Herbert couldn't see, but what everyone on the bank 
 saw, that if Emmanuel was gaining upon them, they were gaining 
 on Lady Margaret. 
 
 ' Now then, pick it up !' 
 
 Stroke had quickened. After they had rounded Ditton, Second 
 Trinity began to creep up in earnest, and the enthusiastic shouts of 
 their supporters on the bank spurred them on to fresh exertions. 
 There was a shout from the bank : 
 
 ' Trinity is spurting ! Put it on ! put it on ! You're gaining V 
 
 So they were, and to some purpose. To the frantic joy of the 
 Trinity men on the bank, they pulled up at every stroke, and the 
 pace was furious. The roar on the bank grew quite delirious, and 
 the cheers were deafening ; and above it all was the sound of 
 Brown's dinner-bell — but even that had no other voice for Herbert 
 than the voice of Jayne : 
 
 * Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 A crew cannot possibly go on spurting for ever, but the moment 
 the spurt was over Lady Margaret ruthlessly forged ahead. It was 
 only too obvious that Lady Margaret was holding her own at only 
 an ordinary stroke. And a great and well-deserved cheer went up 
 from the scarlet blazers on the bank. 
 
 Oh, how Herbert hated them ! 
 
 Still, they had distanced Emmanuel. But Second Trinity were 
 oy no means done with. Time after time Trinity stroke picked his 
 exhausted crew up, and the roar on the bank grew louder and 
 louder. 
 
 • Well rowed, Trinity ! Well rowed all !' 
 
 If Herbert could only have just one look ahead ! The face of 
 the cox is dark and anxious, but surely the two crowds on the 
 bank are mingled now, and the cheers come in one deafening 
 roar ? 
 
 ' Bravo, Trinity ! Pick it up now — you're gaining 1' 
 
 Presently the face of the cox changed ; it was still very grave. 
 
 ' Can you quicken ?' he asked more with his eyes than his lips. 
 Stroke nodded ; he couldn't spare breath to speak. ■ Quicken up P 
 he yelled, and once again, within sight of the Railway Bridge, the 
 Second Trinity spurted. 
 
 They were running a desperate race, but they spurted heroically. 
 Their pluck and determination were past all praise ; and Lady 
 Margaret, who were a length and a half ahead, were wholly un- 
 prepared for it. 
 
 ' Oh, well rowed, Trinity !' 
 
 The frantic shouts from the shore were deafening. It seemed 
 anybody's race now, and the winning-post was in sight. Ther« 
 
THE LENT RACES. 189 
 
 was a roar of encouragement from the bank, and Brown's dinner- 
 bell above it all, and — still more distinctly — the voice of Jayne : 
 
 ' Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 Lady Margaret, respecting the strength of her enemy too late, 
 quickened too, but Second Trinity were upon her, and Herbert felt 
 a shock that sent a shiver all through him ; and the cox was 
 shouting : 
 
 ' Easy ! mind your oars !' 
 
 And the bows of Second Trinity glided up by the side of Lady 
 Margaret, and the next moment they were under the bank. 
 
 ' Oh, well rowed, Trinity !' 
 
 The shouting on the bank was delirious. A bump within sight 
 of the winning-post, with all the world looking on ! The prize, the 
 head of the river ! No wonder Herbert leant over his oar, faint, and 
 with a swimming in his head, and the voices on the bank all merged 
 into one — the voice of Jayne : 
 
 ' Is the arm of the Lord shortened ?' 
 
 It was only for a moment, and, faint, bewildered, he was 
 conscious that something had crashed into them — it had passed 
 him. 
 
 God ! it had struck Geraint !' 
 
 A sudden cry. Five leaps spasmodically into the air — and in a 
 moment the crew of Second Trinity are all struggling in the water. 
 They lift Geraint out, and lay him on the bank, senseless and 
 bleeding. The sharp-pointed iron prow of Emmanuel has pierced 
 his heart, and the life-blood is welling from an awful wound in 
 his side I 
 
 It all happened in a moment, and while the cheers of a thousand 
 spectators, the shouts of victory, are in his ears, he is lying on the 
 grass with his head on Herbert's lap, and Brown wildly attempting 
 to stanch that awful red tide that is flowing from his side. 
 
 The dinner-bell was on the ground beside him — it had rung its 
 last peal. The crews were crowding round with blanched and 
 stricken faces, too shocked and bewildered to grasp the full horror 
 of the situation. Jack Harvard was the first to recover himself. 
 
 The fine old American spirit of being prepared for everything, the 
 habitual coolness of a race inured to danger and familiar with 
 emergencies, had not forsaken him for long, and before a cry could 
 be raised for a doctor, Jack Harvard was half-way across Mid- 
 summer Common in quest of one. He had sprung upon the horse 
 of the Trinity coach, and was flying on a race against Time and 
 Death — by no means new in the annals of his stormy ancestry. He 
 had not to ride far. A window was thrown up in a street near 
 Jesus College, and the welcome face of a well-known surgeon looked 
 out. The furious pace had told its accustomed tale to his practised 
 ear. 
 
 1 For God's sake come quickly !' Harvard exclaimed, panting the 
 words out from his laboured chest. 'There is an awful accident 
 
igo A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 on the bank. The prow of our boat has struck a man in the 
 heart !' 
 
 He had hailed a hansom on the way, and the surgeon jumped in, 
 and there was a mad race through the streets of Cambridge back to 
 the scene of the accident ; and the borough policeman, whose 
 feelings were much outraged by the utter disregard of his threat to 
 summon them for furious driving, relieved his mind by making a 
 note of the occurrence and, as far as he could make out, the number 
 of the cab. 
 
 Alas ! the attitude of the silent group around the hero of the 
 Second Trinity told its own tale. The men all stood around him 
 with uncovered heads. His race was quite run, and he had died a 
 hero's death in the moment of victory. 
 
 He lay upon the grass with that awful pool by his side, like some 
 youthful Samson stricken down in the midst of his manly beauty 
 and his strength. His lips, so still in death, were parted with the 
 old tender smile, and the wind was stirring his fair curls as his head 
 still lay pillowed on Herbert's knee. 
 
 A stretcher had already! been procured, and, by the doctor's 
 orders, for no one else spoke, in the midst of a strangely-hushed 
 silence, they tenderly raised him, and, spreading their gay parti- 
 coloured coats beneath, laid him on it, and the Trinity men covered 
 him reverently with his college blazers. 
 
 The crew of Lady Margaret, the crew he had so splendidly 
 beaten, bore him through the deeply-moved crowd, who stood 
 uncovered while they passed, the crews of Second Trinity and 
 Emmanuel silently following behind. 
 
 That poor old man, Brown, was left kneeling upon the grass, 
 with a stricken look upon his face, and when he blindly rose to his 
 feet he stumbled over the dinner-bell. The sight of the bauble 
 brought back to his dazed senses the awful calamity, and the bitter 
 irony of its surroundings, and Herbert led him away sobbing like 
 a child. 
 
 Who could desire a nobler death than to fall in the midst of the 
 shouts of victory, full in the eyes of knights and dames, struck by 
 some friendly lance ? 
 
 His bright, brief reign was over ; the absolute monarchy of youth 
 and health, of beauty and strength, had been his. He had had his 
 day — his brief golden day — and now, with blanched faces and slow, 
 heavy tread, they bore his unconscious body through the Great 
 Court, past a line of awe-stricken undergraduates, to his own rooms. 
 
 Brown had sobbed his heart out all along the line of way ; but 
 Herbert was silent and dry-eyed. He had received the dear fellow's 
 last breath, the last beat of that generous heart had been throbbed 
 out on his breast, and the only words that his lips could frame 
 in that supreme moment were : ' The arm of the Lord is not 
 shortened !' 
 
 Jayne met him at the head of the stair as he staggered blindly 
 
THE LENT RACES. iqi 
 
 into his rooms. He put his arms around him, and led him in as if 
 he were a child. 
 
 ' Oh, what have we done ! what have we done !' he moaned, 
 speaking for the first time. 
 
 ' Hush !' said Jayne gravely. ' His ways are not our ways. 
 Who can say to what a nobler life he is called ? We know what 
 he has missed here.' 
 
 ' Oh, Jayne, I will never again seek to interfere in the ways of 
 Providence ! But for our misguided prayers he might have been 
 living still !' 
 
 'My poor fellow,' said Jayne softly, and his dark eyea were 
 shining with an inner light, 'spare your reproaches. It was not your 
 poor prayers, or mine, that shortened his life. Depend upon it the 
 counsels of Infinite Wisdom and Beneficence are beyond the reach 
 of our weak human interference.' 
 
 ' Then what is the use of prayer ?' said Herbert bitterly. He 
 was no longer master of himself. 
 
 Jayne's poor plain face was shining back the reflection of 
 that Presence with whom he lived so near, as he softly rebuked 
 Herbert's impatience. 
 
 ' God will have His children ask His aid and direction in all the 
 great issues of life, but He answers in His own way — not ours. 
 He whose mercy compasses man's life knows when the great design 
 s complete, the pattern finished, and then — but not till then — the 
 silver cord is loosed ; not till then the golden bowl is broken.' 
 
 Brown was listening with his red eyes distended and his lips 
 twitching. 
 
 ' Oh, thank God !' he exclaimed, ' that his life has been such a 
 bright one ! It was the kindest, roundest, completest life, I believe, 
 in the whole 'Varsity — in the whole world ! There are dark 
 shadows in all our lives ; thank God there were none in his ! It 
 was rounded off, complete, and perfect before the threatened 
 shadow fell.' 
 
 ' Perfect !' Herbert echoed bitterly. His eyes were hard and 
 burning. The first bitterness of his grief could take no comfort- 
 could find no blessed relief in tears. ' Perfect ! when he is cut off 
 before his life is begun ! Oh, think of the splendid promise 
 of it!' 
 
 _ He buried his face in his hands, but no tears came through his 
 tightly-clenched fingers. Jayne stroked them softly as a mother 
 would stroke the hands of a rebellious child. 
 
 ' Whatever his life's work was, depend upon it, dear fellow, he 
 had finished it. As Brown says, the pattern was quite complete. 
 When the servant has done the task committed to him, then, 
 but not till then, his Master calls him to other work for which his 
 service here has fitted him. Oh, it is a noble plan ! We shall see 
 it some day with clearer eyes ; we see it through a glass darkly now 
 —but then face to face ! Oh, the glory of it * There will be but 
 
192 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 one cloud then to dim the brightness of that perfect vision — ths 
 memory of our foolish impatience, our impotent resistance of the 
 guiding of the kind Hand that has arranged out of loose, aim- 
 less, discordant threads the wonderful complex pattern of our 
 lives.' 
 
 Jayne's face was lighted up with that inner light that made it no 
 longer poor, or plain, or commonplace, and Herbert's rebellious 
 grief was softened, if not subdued before it 
 
 ' You think his life's work was done ?' he said huskily. 
 
 1 1 do not think, my dear fellow ; I should dishonour my Master 
 if I only thought — I am quite sure of it !' 
 
 ' It was not only done,' said Brown solemnly, lifting his cap off 
 as he spoke, ' but it was well done. Thank God for it !' 
 
 CHAPTER XXY. 
 
 AT ELY STATION. 
 
 ' The love that rose on stronger wings, 
 Unpalsied when he met with Death.' 
 
 An hour later Herbert, wrapped up in his thin great-coat (he 
 risked on this supreme occasion being proctorized), was seated in 
 a third-class carriage on the way to Ely. 
 
 In the midst of his grief he had remembered the wretched woman 
 who awaited the dead man in the waiting-room at Ely Station. 
 He shrank from the painful task, but he remembered how G-eraint 
 loved this woman, and for his sake he nerved himself to be the 
 bearer of this awful news. 
 
 Surely he would break it more tenderly than any other S 
 
 Hebe Bellenden was not on the platform when the train stopped. 
 There was a crowd of people on the platform returning from the 
 boat-race, and the accident was on every lip. 
 
 Could she have heard already ? 
 
 Herbert fought his way through the crowd to the deserted wait- 
 ing room. No, not quite deserted, for, sitting in a shadow, in the 
 darkest corner, was a veiled female figure. The light had been 
 turned down, and the room was in semi-darkness, and he could not 
 Bee her distinctly. 
 
 She came forward eagerly ; there was no mistaking the easy 
 grace of that proud, imperious figure. 
 
 ' Oh, you have come at last !' 
 
 Herbert looked up at her gravely as she approached him with, oh 5 
 such a tender light in her eyes, that he had never seen in woman's 
 eyes before. 
 
 How should be tell her r 
 
AT ELY STATION. 193 
 
 She stopped short when she perceived her mistake, and her 
 countenance fell, and the smile seemed frozen on her lipa. 
 
 ' So, he has sent you ?' she said tremulously. 
 
 ' No,' he said sadly, ' he has not sent me.' 
 
 ' Then — then he will not come I He has read my letter. Oh, 
 Mr. Flowers, I took your counsel — I have written to him at the 
 last moment and told him all — everything — and he will not come ! 
 He has sent you to break it to me ?' 
 
 ' No,' said Herbert again, with a strange pity in his eyes ; ■ he has 
 not sent me. But I have, indeed, come to break it to you. Oh, 
 Miss Bellenden, how shall I tell you ?' 
 
 ' Don't tell me !' she said fiercely, her dark eyes flashing with 
 a sudden fire. ' Don't tell me that he shrinks from me with horror, 
 with loathing — that he has ceased to love me — you — you who 
 urged me to confess ! I cannot, I will not, hear my sentence from 
 your cruel lips !' 
 
 Still he was looking at her with that new strange pity in his eyes 
 that goaded her to madness. 
 
 e He will never shrink from you, and he has never ceased to love 
 you,' he said sadly. ' Thank God on your knees, Hebe Bellenden, 
 that you told him, for he knows it all now. He sees with clearer 
 eyes now.' 
 
 Something in his tone struck her, and her face grew suddenly 
 white. 
 
 ' What do you mean ? For God's sake speak plainly ! What do 
 you mean ?' 
 
 She had grasped the back of a chair for support, and was looking 
 at him with a desperate hunger in her eyes, as if she would tear the 
 answer from him. For a moment his courage forsook him. He 
 had never realized until that miserable moment how this cold, 
 proud woman had loved Geraint. 
 
 Herbert led her gently to a seat, with a silent sympathy she 
 could not be blind to. 
 
 ' Do you ever say your prayers ?' he said inconsequently, bending 
 over her, in a hoarse whisper. 
 
 ' You have no right to ask me such a question !' she answered 
 impatiently. ' God help me, I used to !' 
 
 ' If you have not forgotten the way,' he went on hoarsely ; 
 hurriedly, with his hand on her shoulders, as if pressing her down, 
 ' go down on your knee?, Hebe Bellenden, and repeat the words 
 after me, " Thy will be done " ' 
 
 Before he could finish the sentence she had slid off the bench of 
 the waiting-room on to the floor, and lay there huddled up of a 
 heap. 
 
 1 O God !' she cried ; ' he is dead !' 
 
 ' Yes,' Herbert said solemnly, but with a feeling of relief that it 
 Tras over ; ' he is dead.' 
 
 She did not scream, or faint, or weep ; she only sat staring at him 
 
 13 
 
194 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 with her dark eyes blazing, and all the colour dying slowly out 
 of her face beneath those two dreadful patches on her cheeks. 
 And then, to Herbert's horror and alarm, she threw herself for- 
 ward at his feet in a sudden paroxysm of agony, and clutched his 
 knees. 
 
 ' Unsay it ! Oh, unsay it !' she cried. ' Oh, say you're trifling 
 with me, Mr. Flowers — dear, good, kind, generous Mr. Flowers — 
 say you're trifling with me !' 
 
 Herbert entreated her to rise, and got his arms about her to help 
 her up ; but she only clutched his knees the more frantically, and 
 implored him to tell her that he had deceived her. Herbert turned 
 his face to the wall ; he could not look at her. With all her sine, 
 he was so penetrated by the depth of her grief, and her attitude of 
 utter humiliation, that he could not trust himself to look at her. 
 
 ' It is only too true,' he said 3adly. ' He died on my knees, only 
 an hour ago. The prow of a boat pierced him to the heart, and he 
 died suddenly — Dainlessly, we hope.' 
 
 'O my God!' _ 
 
 She did not faint ; Herbert thought she had, and raised her un- 
 resistingly, as he would have lifted a child, and laid her on the 
 bench, and sprinkled some water from the bottle on the table on 
 her face. She gasped once or twice, but else she lay there like one 
 dead, with her eyes closed, and the water, not her tears, making 
 awful channels down through the rouge on her cheeks. 
 
 The time was drawing on, and the last train to Cambridge had 
 been signalled, and still she lay there, and Herbert had not been 
 able to rouse her. 
 
 ' I must go back to Cambridge to-night, Miss Bellenden,' he said 
 desperately ; ' shall I take a ticket for you, or where will you 
 
 go 
 
 9' 
 
 She opened her eyes and looked at him, blankly, but she laid her 
 hand upon his arm with a gesture he took for assent. He came 
 back to her presently and lifted her off the bench, supporting her 
 to the carriage with his arm. 
 
 ' Where is your luggage ?' he asked her. 
 
 ' Luggage ? I have no luggage. He would not let me bring any- 
 thing ;' and then, at the mention of Geraint, she sank back into 
 the cushions of the carriage in a sudden passion of tears. 
 
 He had spent his last remaining half-sovereign in taking first- 
 class tickets to Cambridge, and in feeing the railway-porter to 
 secure an empty carriage for the woman that Geraint had loved. 
 
 He let her weep the first wild burst of her sorrow out undis- 
 turbed. He did not attempt to comfort her. His brain was in a 
 whirl ; the events of the past few hours seemed like some dreadful 
 dream from which he should presently awaken. His mind was 
 feebly groping its way through the awful rush of circumstance to 
 
 that darkened room where — where He woke from his dream 
 
 with a shudder. He could not oursue it any further. And then 
 
AT ELY STATION. 195 
 
 all sorts of speculation arose in his mind, and a question presented 
 itself. Hebe Bellenden had spoken of a letter. Had Geraint 
 received it ? 
 
 He was quite sure in his own mind that he had not. He re- 
 membered the last bright, conscious look of tbat frank face when 
 they had stepped into the boat. He remembered the last words of 
 that cheery voice : ' She will wait for me at Ely ; she has started 
 now.' No, Geraint had never received that letter. He had died in 
 happy ignorance of her guilt and unworthiness ; his last thoughts 
 of her were perfect love and confidence. 
 
 1 When did you send that letter ?' Herbert asked her as they 
 came in sight of Cambridge Station. 
 
 She looked at him with a dazed and puzzled air. 
 
 ' That letter to Geraint,' he explained. 
 
 ' I posted it before I started. I posted it at the station,' she 
 answered mechanically. 
 
 There was a crowd on the platform when the train drew up, 
 and Herbert helped her to alight, and drew her hurriedly through 
 it and placed her in a cab, and told the driver where to take 
 her. 
 
 He stood by the window one moment looking at the crushed and 
 drooping figure that lay back on the cushions, with the cruel lamp- 
 light revealing the paths of her tears on the rouge that still mocked 
 the ghastly whiteness of her face. 
 
 ' Have you any questions to ask me ?' he said ; ' have you any- 
 thing you wish to say ?' 
 
 The question, quite involuntarily, took the form of a final fare- 
 well. 
 
 'No,' she said absently as she lay back, looking vacantly before 
 her, and speaking like one in a dream ; ' I have no questions to 
 ask ; I have nothing to say.' 
 
 Herbert walked back to his college, and passed the well-known 
 figure of the Senior Proctor on his way, followed by his attendant 
 bull-dogs. The Proctor passed him unheeding ; not so the lynx- 
 eyed satellite in his rear. 
 
 ' Trinity man, sir,' said the bull-dog blithely, stepping up to the 
 Proctor, and forthwith Herbert was proctorized for the heinous 
 offence of being at large in the streets of Cambridge after dusk 
 without his cap and gown. 
 
 When he got back to his rooms he learned that Geraint's father 
 had already arrived. He thanked God afterwards that he had not 
 been there to witness that terrible meeting. 
 
 His son's tutor, Mr. Routh, and the Master of Trinity accom- 
 panied him into the room where lay all that was mortal of his first- 
 born, his only son ; and Brown and Jayne, who watched beside him, 
 oroke utterly down when they spoke of the terrible scene of the 
 strong man's grief at that sad meeting. It was too sacred a sight 
 for the eyes of strangers to witness, and they crept out of the room 
 
 13—2 
 
196 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 and waited on the staircase ■without, and presently the Master, his 
 warm, tender nature completely overcame, came out too, weeping 
 like a child. 
 
 Geraint's father was still in the room below when Herbert came 
 in, and Mr. Routh was with him. There could be no further need 
 of concealment now, and Herbert, so far as he could without be- 
 traying Hebe Bellenden's confidence, told Geraint's two friends the 
 story of her late confession. She had only made it at the eleventh 
 hour, and he had not received it. The letter containing it would 
 be now in his room, unopened probably. 
 
 ' It must not fall into his father's hands,' said Herbert, looking 
 from one to the other ; ' we must spare the dear fellow's memory 
 at any cost.' 
 
 ' That,' said Brown very quietly, ' is my legacy. It shall not fall 
 into his father's hands.' 
 
 There had been two deliveries of letters on the staircase since the 
 accident, and Hebe's letter was probably, even now, lying on his 
 table. 
 
 ' What if his father should have opened it ?' 
 
 The suggestion made Herbert's cheek blanch. 
 
 ' There is no time to lose/ said Brown quietly, putting on his cap 
 and gown quite mechanically, and going over to the door. ' You 
 had better come too, Flowers.' 
 
 Herbert followed him down the staircase, and paused, as he had 
 never paused before, at Geraint's door. It would be better, they 
 decided, not to knock ; there would be no cheery voice to shout, 
 ' Come in !' 
 
 They opened the door softly, and entered. Geraint's father and 
 Mr. Routh were still in that inner room, from which a low moaning 
 sound, unlike any sound Herbert had ever heard before, issued. 
 The men stood uncovered, and Brown's eyes swept in one hurried 
 glance every piece of furniture in the room in quest of Hebe's 
 letter, but it was nowhere to be seen. 
 
 Herbert walked over to the fireplace, and took a survey of the 
 nondescript litter on the high mantelpiece. His eyes fell on Hebe's 
 likeness, looking down upon him in her beauty and her pride. 
 Brown's eyes fell on it in the same moment, and the two men ex- 
 changed rapid glances of intelligence ; but before Herbert could 
 raise his hand to remove it the tutor entered the room. 
 
 He blushed dreadfully, as if caught in a felonious act, and 
 covered his confusion by drawing the fire together. It had burned 
 quite hollow, and all the fairy castles that had been upreared had 
 fallen in with a crash. 
 
 ' It will be better to let it go out,' said the tutor ; ' there will be 
 nobody here to-night ; the room will be locked up.' 
 
 Brown looked over at Herbert, but he was silent, and studying 
 the pattern of the tiled hearth. 
 
 ' Ch,' he said humbly, ' if — if I might be allowed to watch here,. 
 
AT ELY STATION. 197 
 
 I don't like leaving him alone ;' and the soft-hearted fellow burst 
 into tears. 
 
 Geraint's father entered while he was speaking. He was so like 
 Geraint himself that Herbert involuntarily started— like Geraint, 
 grown old, and gray, and broken down by some overwhelming 
 sorrow. He had heard Brown's words, and he came over and 
 wrung his hand silently. When he could command himself, he 
 said : 
 
 'You were my son's friend, and — and I thank you for your 
 sympathy.' 
 
 He spoke in a broken voice, but it was the voice of Geraint that 
 G poke. The tone — the familiar tone— brought the first tears into 
 Herbert's eyes. 
 
 ' And this also was his friend,' said the tutor, laying his hand 
 kindly on Herbert's arm. 
 
 He was cold and hard no longer. This common grief had 
 broken down all his reticence. 
 
 • He was my dearest friend,' said Herbert with a catch in his 
 throat ; ' he died in my arms.' 
 
 And then all his self-restraint was swept away, and he flung 
 himself sobbing on the couch. The tutor would have led him 
 away, but Geraint's father interposed. 
 
 ' No, no,' he said ; ' let him stay. It will do me good to have 
 someone here who knew my boy— oh, my darling boy !— and who 
 loved him !' 
 
 Sobs choked his utterance, and Herbert pressed the hand he had 
 given him silently, and the tutor went out and left them together. 
 "While they were yet talking, the postman's familiar rap was 
 heard on the outer door, and the letter fell into the room. 
 
 ' For my son ?' said Geraint's father, holding out his hand me- 
 chanically for the letter. 
 
 ' For me,' said Brown unblu shingly, putting the pink scented 
 missive in his pocket. ' I have my letters left here ; it saves the 
 man going up.' 
 
 And then Geraint's father began pacing the room in Geraint's 
 old impatient manner — the same restlessness ; the same undecided 
 action ; the same thoughtful, thoughtless gait, stopping every now 
 and then to look at objects with keen, critical eyes, as if all the 
 world depended on the result, while the mind was far away ; 
 seeing the smallest minutia, insensible to every object. Herbert 
 and Brown watched him while he paced the familiar room, 
 pausing before the pictures, lingering over the writing-table where 
 Geraint's books and papers were scattered about in his usual reck- 
 less, untidy fashion, but always pausing before that door, as if 
 something sacred were behind it. 
 
 How long he kept this restless vigil they could not tell, as they 
 sat dazed and silent by that familiar hearth. What visions must 
 have arisen before their minds of the gay scenes that had bcea 
 
198 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 enacted there ! The orgies — no, distinctly no — the thoughtless 
 wine-parties, the gambling and riot and youthful follies, the 
 generous, lavish hospitality, the healthy, manly enthusiasm in all 
 noble sports, the chivalrous defence of all things pure and good — 
 they recalled all this as they sat by his deserted hearth. 
 
 ' And what is this ?' asked the unhappy man, as he paused in his 
 walk before the portmanteaus that were lying ready strapped upon 
 the floor. 
 
 ' Oh, he was going down as soon as the races were over. He 
 had got his exeat, 1 said Herbert, quite truthfully. 
 
 ' Oh, my boy ! My poor boy ! Yes ; he has got his exeat/' and 
 again the unhappy parent broke into a passion of grief. ' " O 
 Absalom ! my son, my son !" ' 
 
 They had hoped that he would not observe the likeness on the 
 mantelpiece, but Herbert dared not remove it. He stopped before 
 all the familiar home pictures on the walls — the things that 
 Geraint loved to collect around him : the crayon drawing of the 
 old family place ; the feeble water-colour of the beech avenue in 
 the park ; the rude, unskilful sketches of the rough collie dog, the 
 worn-out old mare knee-deep in meadow grass, the church on the 
 hill, the kennel in the valley, the lodge gate, with the gardener's 
 children peeping through. They all had a voice to the unhappy 
 man wandering among the lares et penates of his dead son. 
 
 'And who is this ?' he asked, looking up at Hebe's beautiful face 
 smiling down with that dreamy, passionate smile that had no 
 charm for him. 
 
 1 Oh, this belongs to me,' said Brown, with unblushing effrontery. 
 1 It's a girl I was once engaged to.' 
 
 Oh, Maria I 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE. 
 
 ' An awful thought, a life removed ; 
 The human-hearted man I loved, 
 A spirit, not a breathing voice.' 
 
 There never had been so full an attendance at morning chapel at 
 Trinity during the Lent term as there was the morning succeeding 
 the accident. The undergraduate benches were crowded, and the 
 men looked across the gloom at each other with white, stricken 
 faces. 
 
 ' Oh, Flowers, it might have been me I' said Spurway, stopping 
 him on the steps as they came out of chapel ; ' it would have been 
 me if you had refused, as I should have been the right weight !' 
 
 He didn't ' confound the beggar's impudence' now. 
 
THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE. 199 
 
 1 It would certainly have been me but for that sudden faintness,' 
 said Number Five, with a stricken look on his face. • It's nothing 
 short of a miracle it wasn't.' 
 
 'A few ounces more weight and it would have been me,' said 
 Herbert with a sigh. He was thinking he should not have been 
 so much missed as Geraint. But before he had got half-way across 
 the Great Court, the face of the little mother at Bideford rose up 
 before him, and he humbly thanked God for his deliverance. 
 
 Oh, what a day it was at Trinity ! 
 
 There was a change, that every undergraduate was conscious of, 
 in the moral atmosphere of the place. A spasm of virtuous re- 
 action had run through every court and up every college staircase. 
 There was not an oath heard in Trinity ; there was not a knave or 
 queen seen in a single man's rooms throughout that sad week. 
 The college smoking concert was put off, and the debate at the 
 Union deferred ; and men trod softly and spoke in hushed voices 
 as they passed through the silent courts. 
 
 The comic man of Trinity, Cudworth, was as limp and dejected 
 as the once brilliant Jackdaw of Rheims, and in the place of the 
 cheerful ' Caw !' with which he habitually climbed the staircase, he 
 whispered the old familiar refrain, ' Kicklebury Brown,' under his 
 breath to a Psalm tune. 
 
 There was an inquest held the following day in the Great Hall. 
 The room was quite full of University men, and Geraint's father 
 came in on the arm of the Master. 
 
 We will draw a veil over that sad, sad scene. No regrets nor 
 recriminations could bring back the bright young life. It was 
 nobody's fault ; but everybody was to blame. The marvel was, 
 not that the accident had happened, but that it had not happened 
 before. Every boating man present could remember a hundred 
 hairbreadth escapes. 
 
 The jury returned a verdict of ' Accidental Death,' with a rider 
 appended cautioning the boat club on the further use of such 
 sharply- pointed bows to their boats. 
 
 This, indeed, was the only outcome of the inquest. 
 
 A special captain's meeting was called later on by the President 
 of the C.U.B.C., and the use of indiarubber buffers, or, rather, 
 protective knob3 of indiarubber, on the bows of the boats was 
 decided on in all future bumping races on the Cam. 
 
 There was nothing more to be done but those sad last things. 
 The poor bereaved father had broken so completely down at the 
 inquest, that it was deemed advisable for him to return to town 
 until the day of the funeral. 
 
 The oak of Geraint's room was closed after the jury had viewed 
 the body, and except that sad black procession that glided stealthily 
 through the court bearing the last necessary equipment for all 
 future needs, the rooms were unopened during the day. 
 
 When night came, still and shivering, the men oame sadly out of 
 
200 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Hall and dispersed silently to their rooms. One of the crew, who 
 rowed Six, followed Herbert up the stairs and asked if he might 
 come in for a few minutes' talk. 
 
 There was only one subject he could talk about as he sat with a 
 blanched face by Herbert's hearth — his miraculous escape. The 
 prow of the Emmanuel boat had glided by him, and passing over 
 his rigger, had pierced Geraint. He was sure that it was his dead 
 mother's hand that had averted the danger, her prayers alone thai 
 had saved him. 
 
 And then, while the softening mood was on him, he went on to 
 tell Herbert how she had made him promise to say his prayers 
 night and morning at Eton, and how the other fellows had laughed 
 him out of it ; how he had begun his schoolboy life by reading 
 first a chapter, and then a verse a day — and then none at all : how 
 he had been led into all sorts of youthful follies — card-playing, 
 gambling, betting — and how he and Spurway had spent their 
 Sundays at a village near Cambridge in unseemly ways. 
 
 The poor, broken-down fellow made this frank confession of all 
 his misdeeds to his brother-undergraduate with a simple, straight- 
 forward manliness that went to Herbert's heart. His mother, he 
 told him, had died while he was yet at Eton, and he had been sent 
 for hurriedly, and with her dying breath she had implored him to 
 live a useful Christian life, not a life of ease and self-seeking. 
 ' What if he had been called to meet her ?' 
 
 Jayne came in while he was making his unreserved confession, 
 and Herbert left them together. 
 
 It was quite late that night when Brown came in and borrowed 
 the key of Herbert's oak. He gave it to him without any questions, 
 supposing that he had mislaid his own ; but Brown did not cross 
 the landing at once to his own rooms, but went down the stairs. 
 It was so late that Herbert wondered where he could be going, and 
 went over to the door to call after him. But Brown had not gone 
 far. The lights on the college staircase were out, but looking down 
 over the stairs in the gloom he saw, by the light of the candle 
 that Brown carried, that he was fumbling at the lock of Geraint's 
 oak, first trying one key, then another. At last he got one to fit, 
 and noiselessly entered the room, closing the door softly after 
 him. 
 
 What business could he have there at that hour ? 
 
 Herbert asked himself the question as he sat by his fire, leaving 
 his door ajar to see him as he came up. 
 
 But Brown did not come up, and Herbert dozed, and his fire 
 burned low, and still in the silence of the night he heard him 
 moving about in the room beneath. His nerves were so overstrung 
 he could bear the suspense no longer ; he must find out what 
 Brown was doing. 
 
 He went quietly down the stairs and softly opened the door of 
 Geraint's room, and there, before the poor fellow's writing-table, 
 
THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE. 201 
 
 on his knees, was Brown. He was so intent upon turning out and 
 examining every scrap of paper that the drawers contained that he 
 did not hear Herbert enter the room. On the floor, with the con- 
 tents scattered about, were the portmanteaus that Geraint was to 
 have taken with him on his journey. Evidently every drawer and 
 piece of furniture in the room, and the pockets of his clothes even, 
 had been ransacked and turned out in a thorough and exhaustive 
 search. 
 
 For what ? 
 
 Herbert asked himself the question fearfully, as he watched the 
 nervous working of Brown's anxious face. 
 
 A horrible misgiving seized him, and he went out of the room as 
 softly as he had come in, and groped his way upstairs. 
 
 Was Brown searching for that wretched I.O.U. that might, that 
 must, fall into Geraint's father's hands ? 
 
 For a whole hour Herbert tormented himself with this horrible 
 suggestion. He knew how weak Brown was ; he knew every flaw 
 and failing in that faulty character. ' And if he found it, what 
 would he do with it ? He couldn't repudiate the debt, though not 
 half a dozen men in the college knew of it.' 
 
 He turned the miserable suggestion of Brown's guilt over in his 
 mind until he was quite sick ; but still Brown did not come up- 
 stairs. Should he go down and stop that dreadful inquisition into 
 the dead man's secrets ? Should he go down and save Brown from 
 himself ? 
 
 He went down on his knees on that bit of worn carpet first, and 
 then he went downstairs. 
 
 He opened Geraint's door, not softly now, but with an intention 
 of being heard ; but he paused on the threshold. 
 
 Brown's back was towards him, and he was bending over the 
 fireplace, where a flame that he was continually feeding with papers 
 was flaring up the chimney. 
 
 By the light of the flame Brown's poor, weak face was radiant 
 and shining. He turned his head when the door opened, and met 
 Herbert's eyes. One look told him how unworthy were his 
 suspicions — how he had wronged Brown. 
 
 ' See,' said Brown with an air of satisfaction, rubbing his hands, 
 ' I have burnt 'em all. I haven't left a corner unsearched. I have 
 turned out every drawer, and pocket, and desk, and bag ; there 
 isn't one left to witness against him ;' and as he spoke he drew the 
 ashes together, and threw the last fragments of the dainty pink 
 notes, so caref idly treasured by the dead man, into the flame. 
 
 ' We must go and tell him now,' he said when the flame had died 
 quite out, and he led the way into the inner chamber. 
 
 Herbert had not seen Geraint since they had brought him back. 
 He had never seen death in any form before, and he was unpre- 
 pared for the change that death stamps on the familiar face. 
 
 Familiar, alas ! no longer. 
 
202 A FELLOW OF TRINITY 
 
 The same, but not the same. Every noble lineament of the 
 marble face was so much nobler. Every tender trait that made 
 him the lovable, high-sonled, chivalrous nature he was, was so much 
 tenderer. The death-smile had but stamped in ineffable sweetness 
 all that had endeared him to every soul in the college. 
 
 Brown laid his hands on the cold, waxen fingers that were 
 crossed over his manly breast — the kind hands that had saved him 
 from dishonour and death. 
 
 ' It's all right, dear fellow,' he said, bending over the still face 
 and clasping the cold, dead hands ; ' it's all right. I've destroyed 
 all those miserable letters. There's not a line left among all your 
 papers that your mother may not see. There's not a letter left 
 among them that your sisters may not read.' 
 
 ' It's the only return I could make him, Flowers,' he explained as 
 they groped their way up the dark staircase, for his candle had 
 burnt itself out. ' It's the only return that I can make him now 
 for what he has done for me. There will never be a shadow on his 
 dear memory now — not the faintest shadow, thank God !' 
 
 When Herbert and Brown talked the matter over on the day f ol- 
 wing, Brown remarked, incidentally, it was a very odd thing, but 
 he had not come across the paper he had given Geraint for the 
 two hundred and seventy-five pounds he had let him have. 
 
 1 1 have looked through every paper the dear fellow has left 
 behind him,' said Brown, ' not for that, but for those other things ; 
 but I never came across it. If it had been there I must have seen 
 it. Can he have destroyed it ?' 
 
 And then Herbert all at once remembered that little sealed pack- 
 age of papers that Geraint had given him to destroy on the night 
 before the boat-race. 
 
 He brought it sorrowfully out of the drawer, where he had locked 
 it away in Geraint's presence, and laid it on the table between them, 
 and told Brown how it had come into his hands, and the promise 
 he had solemnly given the dead man. 
 
 ' I think the time has now come for me to fulfil his last injunc- 
 tions,' he said, stirring the fire into a cheerful blaze, and looking 
 meaningly at Brown. 
 
 Brown's face was working strangely as he laid his hand upon 
 Herbert's arm, and stopped him in the act of dropping the packet 
 into the flames. 
 
 ' Stop,' he saicl huskily ; ' you have no right to do this, knowing 
 what you now know. If you had done it yesterday, you would 
 have been justified ; but not now. You know, and I know, that 
 that paper is in here ;' and he tapped the packet in Herbert's hand 
 as be spoke. ' The dear fellow had put it in here in order that it 
 should never witness against me. His last generous thought was 
 for me — thank God for it ! But though I love him and honour 
 him for it more than I can ever express, I have no right to accept 
 it from him. "We must put the packet in his father's hands, 
 
THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE. 203 
 
 Flowers, and you must open it in his presence and take that paper 
 cut.' 
 
 Herbert was humiliated into the dust when he remembered his 
 unjust suspicions of this weak, simple fellow, who could rise to 
 heights of self-denial and sacrifice he had never dreamed of. 
 
 Later in the day Geraint's friends arrived, for the funeral was to 
 be on the morrow. Herbert saw them from his window crossing 
 the Great Court. On the arm of Geraint's father was a tall lady 
 dressed in black, and closely veiled. A tall, elegant woman, with a 
 noble air, as of one accustomed to command. This could not be 
 Geraint's mother, he told himself, with a catch in his breath ; 
 ' surely this must be Mary Barclay !' 
 
 He heard them enter and close the door of that room below, and 
 he sat with his face in his hands picturing that sad meeting. He re- 
 membered with, oh ! so much thankfulness, that Brown had brought 
 away the photograph of Hebe, and that those tell-tale letters 
 would never be read by the woman the poor fellow had deceived. 
 
 It might have been an hour later when Geraint's father knocked 
 at his door and begged him and Brown to come down to his son's 
 rooms. They followed him down the staircase silently, and into 
 the familiar room. It had all been restored to its former state, 
 and the portmanteaus on the floor had been repacked, before Brown 
 had left the room the previous night ; but there were still the ashes 
 of Hebe's letters in the grate. 
 
 A tall, stately figure robed in black stood beside Geraint's writing- 
 table. It turned slowly as they entered, and looked at them — a 
 pale, grave woman's face, not strictly beautiful, but with an inde- 
 scribable majesty in it. 
 
 She advanced slowly, with her rich sable dress trailing on the 
 floor, and her veil thrown back, to where they stood uncovered and 
 abashed before the sacredness of her grief. She held, out her hand 
 to Herbert, but she took no notice of Brown. 
 
 ' You loved him,' she said by way of introduction, looking straight 
 into his eyes with her white, set face. 
 
 4 1 loved him dearly,' he answered in a low voice that he made a 
 vain effort to steady ; ' who could help loving him ?' 
 
 He paused ; he could not go on speaking in a general way when 
 he saw the desperate hunger in her eyes. 
 
 ' But ' — and here his lip trembled as he spoke — ' but Brown here 
 loved him more than any of us. He had reason to. He saved his 
 life.' 
 
 She turned from him and held out her hand to Brown, and her 
 voice was softer as she spoke to him : 
 
 ' He saved your life ?' 
 
 Brown took her outstretched hand humbly, but he could not meet 
 her eyes. 
 
 The poor, tender-hearted fellow was so overcome that he turned 
 his head aside to hide his tears. 
 
204 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' My life ? — not mine alone — the lives and happiness of all I lore. 
 I was in ghastly trouble, and — and he was my salvation ! I should 
 not be here now to tell the story had he not come to me, unsought, 
 and lifted me out of a bottomless pit of despair. When you know 
 that, you will know why I love him P 
 
 ' I understand,' she said softly, checking Brown's confession ; and 
 then with a sudden gesture of despair and a low cry, the bitterness 
 of which rung in Herbert's ears for many days, she exclaimed : 
 ' but, oh, what is your love to mine ? Do you know ? I — I was to 
 have married him !' 
 
 The remembrance of her own grief sealed the fountain of her 
 tears, and her marble face, which had flushed into life at Brown's 
 broken words, grew white and hard again. 
 
 Later in the day Brown brought Geraint's father up into Herbert's 
 room, and told him of the sealed packet and the instructions con- 
 cerning it. 
 
 ' I have no desire to pry into my dear boy's secrets,' he said, and 
 a mist rose up before his eyes as he spoke, and blotted all the red 
 seals on it, with the familiar crest, till they swam before his eyes 
 like drops of blood. ' I am sure whatever they were they were 
 honourable and manly.' 
 
 ' Will you give me permission to open it ?' Brown asked ; ' there 
 is a paper in it I am interested in, which you ought to — which yon 
 must see.' 
 
 1 1 have no wish to see it. If my dear boy had desired me to see 
 it, he would not have sealed it up and left the instructions he has 
 left. The trust is yours, not mine ; open it if you will. I will 
 have nothing to do with it.' 
 
 He turned away as he spoke, and looked out of the window into 
 the gloomy court without, while Brown hurriedly broke the seals. 
 
 It seemed like sacrilege, and he opened the packet with trembling 
 hands. It contained nothing but letters, dainty pink letters with 
 that subtle fragrance hanging about them that Herbert remembered 
 so well. Brown looked through them eagerly ; at the bottom of the 
 packet lay the folded paper with the formal acknowledgment of his 
 debt, evidently added to the packet as an after-thought. 
 
 He laid this aside, and tied the packet up again, and placed it in 
 Herbert's hands. 
 
 ' Have you found what you want ?' inquired Geraint's father, 
 still with his back to them, looking out into the court. 
 
 ' Yes, sir,' said Brown steadily ; ' I have found this, and I beg 
 you to read it ;' and he placed the document in his hands. 
 
 He read it calmly all through, remarking even the date, and, 
 looking over his glasses at Brown, inquired if he were the Mr. Brown 
 referred to. 
 
 ' Yes, sir,' said Brown meekly, with his eyes on the floor, and his 
 heart full to overflowing. 
 
 ' And my son lent you this money ?' 
 
THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE. 205 
 
 ' It was not money only,' said Brown, deeply moved ; ' it wa* 
 ife and honour to me at the time. He did it unasked.' 
 
 A tender smiie curled the pale lips of Geraint's father — a smila 
 ihey remembered, oh, so well — and he came over to the fire where 
 the packet containing Hebe Bellenden's letters was sending a fierce 
 flame up the chimney. ' My son never did things by halves, sir,' 
 said the father proudly. ' He did not desire this obligation to be 
 remembered. His last act and wish, which I carry out gladly, 
 thankfully, cancels the debt for ever ;' and he held the paper in the 
 flame until it was consumed, and dropped from his fingers into the 
 midst of the ashes of Hebe's letters. 
 
 There was a funeral service held next day in the college chapel, 
 and Geraint's coffin was placed in the aisle between the rows of 
 white-robed undergraduates, many of whom realized, perhaps, for 
 the first time, the near and personal significance of death. The 
 solemn presence which had brushed so closely by them had left its 
 passing shadow on every careless face. 
 
 Loving hands had robbed it, so far as love could reach, of its 
 gloom, and the coffin was heaped up with white flowers, and 
 Geraint's vacant seat in the chapel of his college, among the third- 
 year men, was filled with wreaths and crosses of pale flowers — fit 
 emblems of him who had passed from among them wearing the 
 white flower of a blameless Life. 
 
 There was only one dark spot amid all that profusion of pale 
 blossoms — a tiny wreath of purple violets, made by a woman's 
 hand, and wet still with a woman's tears. 
 
 Hebe had sent it with a pleading message that Herbert could not 
 resist, and he had placed it with his own hands on her lover's 
 bier. 
 
 There was not a dry eye in the great white-robed company, and 
 the Dean's voice faltered and failed as he read the most touching 
 words written by human pen, in that brief committal of all that is 
 finite to the immeasurable compassion of the Infinite. 
 
 The college servants stood weeping round the chapel-door, and 
 the bedmakers gathered in knots, with their aprons to their eyes, in 
 the Great Court outside. There was only one tearless face in the 
 vast crowd that filled the chapel, and that was the white unmoved 
 face of Mary Barclay. 
 
 There had never been a more hearty service within those historic 
 walls, and the choir of Trinity had not the singing by any means to 
 themselves. 
 
 ' Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom ; 
 Lead Thou me on !' 
 
 As the holy invocation floated upward from so many fresh young 
 voices, from so many softened hearts, pulsing with all the eager 
 warmth of early manhood, in a murmur so fervent and intense, it 
 
2o6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY 
 
 seemed like the articulation of every heart-beat of the vast white- 
 robed congregation. 
 
 Brown, impatient of restraint and dreadfully out of tune, kept a 
 syllable or two in advance all through the hymn, and lingered on 
 the closing cadence, oblivious to all sense of time and place, and 
 finished it off entirely on his own responsibility, long after the 
 trained voices of the choir had ceased. 
 
 Nature, in sympathy with the grief within the chapel, was raining 
 her cold tears down on the roof and the court without, and the 
 painted windows were blotched and blurred with great tears 
 running down the panes. 
 
 It was the longest funeral cortege that ever started from Trinity: 
 not only the men of his own college, but the men of Emmanuel — 
 the saddest mourners, perhaps, of all — and the crews of all the 
 college boats, and many of the tutors and men of other colleges. 
 
 It was the saddest weather, stormy and wet without, and mud, 
 mud, mud, deep in all the roads through which the long, black, 
 silent procession wound, and sadder and wetter in the green church- 
 yard where it rested, and where the men stood among the graves 
 knee-deep in soddened gra«s. 
 
 Herbert was so far off that he could only hear the opening words 
 ' I am the Resurrection and the Life ' ; and he kept repeating them 
 softly to himself throughout the service. But Brown would not be 
 kept back ; he pressed through the crowd to the front, and stood 
 bare-headed in the rain beside the open grave. 
 
 Mary Barclay saw him as she bent down to take her last look at 
 the coffin of her dead love, and across G-eraint's grave she saw the 
 face of Brown. She had never shed a tear throughout that trying 
 ordeal, and her noble face had hardened with its stony grief into 
 rigid lines, like a face chiselled in marble. 
 
 The tears were running down Brown's face, and he was sobbing 
 as if his soft, manly heart would break, as he looked down into the 
 yawning chasm at his feet, where Nature's tears were falling on the 
 white flowers of the wreaths, and on the dark violet spot in their 
 midst, that looked to him, in his jealous love, like a purple stain. 
 
 The sight of the faithful fellow's grief broke Mary Barclay down, 
 as her own grief had failed to, and she broke out suddenly into an 
 uncontrollable fit of sobbing, as they bore her away to the carriages 
 waiting at the gate. 
 
• SPARRING. 1 ac7 
 
 CHAPTER XXVH 
 
 1 SPARRING.' 
 
 * I— I, at least, -will have a mill to-night f 
 
 There was another name painted in white letters over the door of 
 Greraint's rooms when Herbert came back after the Easter vaca- 
 tion. 
 
 He saw it as he climbed the staircase when he came back, with 
 his little shabby portmanteau in his hand, and it made him shiver 
 and tnrn cold. 
 
 He had only been down to Lynn with Jayne, and he had been 
 reading hard all the vac, so that he was not very much fresher for 
 the change. 
 
 He had not yet learnt the lesson, always so sadly learnt, of faith, 
 submission, and realization of the Unseen. There was a void in his 
 life now — a page folded down among those records of youthful 
 friendships that he could never turn again without a pang. . 
 
 Sorrow and Death had been busy at Trinity during the short 
 vacation, and the gentle mistress had been removed from the Lodge. 
 There was a feeble, broken-hearted old man wandering sadly about 
 the courts, and sitting, with his face buried in his hands, in the 
 Master's seat in chapel. He was no longer formidable, and his 
 rustling silk gown no longer struck awe into the hearts of conscience- 
 stricken undergraduates. 
 
 Herbert met him once in the cloisters, where he walked so often 
 now, and so late, when the shadows of the soft spring evenings 
 were closing in. He stopped him as he was passing softly by with 
 his head uncovered. 
 
 ' I have to thank you, Mr. Flowers ' he began in his old 
 
 stately way, and then he burst into tears and laid his trembling 
 hand on Herbert's arm. ' I have to thank you,' he continued in a 
 broken voice, ' for — for the comfort your visit gave my dear wife. 
 I mean the comfort she derived from your account of the 
 mysterious call which summoned you to Mr. Brown's assistance. 
 It confirmed a deeply-felt conviction in her mind of the near 
 connection between this life and the future one. It soothed her 
 last moments with a certain hope that — that the separation, so 
 bitter to me, would be no real separation ; that she would be with 
 me still, within speaking distance, but, alas ! beyond sight and 
 touch.' 
 
 He had forgotten Herbert's presence, and was repeating to him- 
 self, in an anguished voice, ' Beyond sight and touch !' 
 
 Herbert crept softly away. This tower of strength and learning, 
 
208 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 which had once struck awe into every heart in Trinity, so broken 
 and enfeebled by sorrow, was too sacred a sight for him to intrude 
 upon, and he crept humbly away, while the great man wandered 
 alone through the darkening cloisters, making his feeble, inarticulate 
 moan. 
 
 He met Lilian Howell once in the ante-chapel. He would have 
 passed her with that conscious blush upon his face her presence 
 always stirred, but she stopped him. He had not seen her since 
 the day of G-eraint's funeral, when, from her seat beneath the 
 organ-loft, she had looked across the white-robed congregation, at 
 Brown singing all alone, with a film of tears glistening in her 
 eyes. 
 
 There were no tears in her eyes now, but there were dark 
 shadows beneath them, and she was looking white and thin. 
 
 '"My aunt,' she said softly, but in a steady voice, and her gray 
 eyes were looking through Herbert as she spoke, ' left a message 
 for you, Mr. Flowers : I was to thank you in her name for — for 
 the comfort you had given her, and — and — in her name to say, 
 " God bless you !" ' 
 
 She said it very solemnly, and Herbert bowed his head very low 
 — it seemed like the benediction of an angel ; and when he looked 
 up she was gone. 
 
 She never spoke to him again that term, and when she met him 
 in the court, if she didn't exactly look over his head, she never 
 looked kindly at him. Her white, set, serious face said as plain as 
 plain could be : 
 
 ' I am dreadfully disappointed in you, Mr. Flowers.' 
 
 At least he read it so. 
 
 He saw no more of the Bellendens that term, and when once, by 
 accident, he passed the house, there were printed bills on either 
 gate of the Myrtles, and on bits of carpet hanging out of the 
 windows, announcing a sale by auction of the elegant and useful 
 household furniture. 
 
 Mr. Grinley he met once or twice in the streets of Cambridge, 
 but that gentleman, who wore an eyeglass, was deeply interested 
 when he passed him in the contemplation of a distant object, and 
 his amiable dog, with his unfailing sagacity, made a snap at his 
 heels as he passed. 
 
 He saw him yet once again, driving in a high dog-cart on a 
 country road some miles outside Cambridge ; at least, the lady 
 beside him was driving, and it did not need the bull -dog behind to 
 tell him that that inconsequent Jehu was Julie. 
 
 Madam Spurway had not been seen so frequently in the streets 
 of Cambridge of late. It was hinted that she had widened her 
 horizon, and discovered other fields and pastures new — the downs 
 of Newmarket among them — for the display of her charms and 
 her toilettes. 
 
 Rumour had whispered that there was a breach in the menage of 
 
'SPARRING.' 209 
 
 the Hutel Spurway, as his friends good-naturedly called the little 
 villa at Trumpington ; and rumour for once was right. A change 
 had come over Spurway, as, indeed, who was not changed in some 
 way by the recent accident, among the careless as well as the 
 thoughtful undergraduates of Trinity ? He turned up at chapel 
 with surprising regularity, and for the time had severed his con- 
 nection with the turf ; and, though he still continued to give wines 
 pretty freely, there was not a card turned in his rooms during the 
 remainder of the term. 
 
 He came to see Herbert when he came up, and brought him a 
 Very tender message from the little mother. He was drifting off 
 from his old fast set, with whose sayings and doings we have no 
 business in these pages, and he had not yet joined another set. A 
 good deal of his old conceit was taken out of him, but he was not 
 ret quite prepared to be seen beyond the courts of his college with 
 r, man whose coat was shining at the seams, and, meanwhile, he had 
 ceased to ' confound the beggar's impudence.' 
 
 Brown had come up before him, and was already at work. A 
 change had come over Brown, too, during that short Easter vacation, 
 and it was rumoured among his friends that he had turned over a 
 new leaf. 
 
 He had already turned over a good many in his time. He went 
 to chapel with surprising regularity, and was reported to be working 
 hard for his degree. But no amount of lectures, or chapels, or 
 reading, could satisfy Brown's newly-awakened conscience. His 
 third year had been full of large dreams and small performances, 
 and had ended in disgrace. His fourth year had found him 
 humbled, and with no faith left in himself. 
 
 All his struggles to set himself right had ended in failure and 
 disappointment. He had ceased entirely to believe in Richard 
 Brown. He wasn't at all surprised that Maria had given him 
 up. He had never been good enough for her — and she was an 
 angel ! 
 
 The angel was going to marry a country surgeon in good practice, 
 shortly. And the satisfaction that Brown derived from the suffer- 
 ing her inconstancy inflicted on his faithful heart was, indeed, 
 quite remarkable. He was never happy or satisfied with himself 
 in these early days of reformation unless he were doing the most 
 disagreeable things in the world, and denying himself everything 
 that he most desired. 
 
 It was the only way, he told Herbert, to keep himself right. It 
 was a great secret, and he had found it out, and he recommended 
 it to him. 
 
 It wasn't very new to Herbert. He had tried it already, of 
 necessity, too often. 
 
 Jayne had tried it so long that it had ceased to be painful, and 
 had become part of his nature ; but he encouraged it in Brown. 
 
 1 There's the stuff in him,' he used to say to Herbert, ' that in 
 
 14 
 
210 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 the old days they made martyrs of. The weak, pliable clay that, 
 turned on the wheel by the Master's hand, becomes a vessel of 
 honour. The more he is emptied of self, the more ready he 
 will be for the Master's use, and He will use him in His own 
 time.' 
 
 Though he had so much reading to do for his degree, and it was 
 his last chance, Brown devoted three evenings a week to Barnwell, 
 and took a district for daily visiting in the most unsavoury court 
 of that unsavoury quarter. 
 
 And Jayne, who had taken his degree at Christmas, and was in 
 residence as a bachelor attending divinity lectures, had the temerity 
 to encourage him in it. 
 
 Harvard had thrown himself more heartily into the mission 
 work at Barnwell since the accident on the river. 
 
 ' I must work it off somehow,' he explained. ' I have given up 
 boating, dearly as I love it. I can't bear the sight of the river ; 
 and I must use up the energy somehow.' 
 
 He used it up in a very unusual way. 
 
 An astonishing placard, printed in the University colour, was 
 posted conspicuously throughout Barnwell. It announced in the 
 first place a mission service, to be followed by an address on 
 temperance, and at the foot of the bill occurred a remarkable line — 
 ' Sparring.' 
 
 It had the desired effect at any rate. It attracted an unusually 
 large audience. Usually a few women and children made up the 
 scanty audience at these mission services ; but to-night the benches 
 were well filled, and there was a large sprinkling of men. 
 
 Later on in the evening, when the exciting event might be 
 expected to come off, a crowd of loafers hung round the door. 
 They had let the women and children have the preaching and the 
 hymns all to themselves, but they were quite willing to come in at 
 the end, and get what fun they could out of it. 
 
 Perhaps they did not get too much fun in their lives at any time. 
 There were no delightful games of skill for them — no manly recrea- 
 tion to develop pluck, perseverance and muscle. There was only 
 the public-house round the corner, and the taproom, with its glow- 
 ing curtain. 
 
 When the address was over and the hymn was sung, Harvard re- 
 quested the women and children to withdraw, as he had a few words 
 to say to the men. But very few ladies availed themselves of this 
 permission. Sume mothers took their children to the door and dis- 
 missed them, returning themselves to enjoy the afterpiece, Tommy's 
 mother among the number, Tommy's little brother having evinced 
 a lively and precocious interest in the proceedings. 
 
 When the door was opened for the men they came in noisily, 
 with an assumption of bluster and a not-to-be-convinced-by-you 
 kind of manner. There was the usual amiable struggle for the 
 best seats, or foi some point of vantage where they could get the 
 
'sparring: 211 
 
 best view of the raised platform upon which were the small party 
 of undergraduates. 
 
 Brown came forward modestly, looking limp and dejected. He 
 was not a favourable specimen of the Cambridge undergraduate, 
 with his ragged gown, and disreputable cap, and his frayed waist- 
 coat, with a button or two missing, and his trousers baggy at the 
 knees. 
 
 ' Fact is,' he explained uneasily, * I have no right to be here ; not, 
 at least, as an advocate of temperance. I haven't tried it long 
 enough to tell you anything about it. I don't know, indeed, why 
 my friends have put me forward to speak to you ;' and he looked 
 round with a puzzled, inquiring air at Jayne and Harvard, who 
 stood behind him. 
 
 ' Go on, old fellow !' said Harvard encouragingly, and Jayne only 
 smiled and nodded. 
 
 ' Oh, I have it !' said Brown, beaming in his usual delightful 
 way ; ' I have come before you as an example of the other 
 side !' 
 
 And as he spoke his face grew clouded and grave, and in a few 
 words he told them how his University career had been marred, 
 and his life spoiled by thoughtless, selfish indulgence ; how he had 
 broken the heart of the kindest of fathers ; how he had sacrificed 
 the affections of the best of women ; how in a moment of despera- 
 tion he had attempted his own life. If there ever had been a 
 prodigal in the University of Cambridge, that poor shamed wretch 
 now stood before them. He had taken the portion that appertained 
 to him, and he had gone into a far country, and wasted that care- 
 fully-hoarded patrimony in drunkenness and riotous living. There 
 was not a man in Cambridge who had led such a foolish life ; he 
 had not only partaken of the husks rejected by the swine, the scum 
 of the University, but he had sunk still lower : he had been swine 
 among swine. And out of all this filth, out of the mire of despair, 
 a kind hand had raised him, and he had arisen, like the prodigal of 
 old, and he had gone to his Father. 
 
 He paused and looked round, with the tears in his eyes, blurring 
 all the faces before him like faces in a moving glass. 
 
 ' Oh, my friends,' he said huskily, * I don't think that there is a 
 man here who has wasted his life and his opportunities like I have ; 
 but I have, thank God ! left the husks and the swine behind, and I 
 have returned to my Father's house, and I have found — what you all 
 will find — an abundant welcome !' 
 
 1 You don't look much the better for it !' said a voice from the 
 crowd. 
 
 ' No,' said Brown humbly, ' I am a poor creature ; I suppose I 
 don't. It's all the more astonishing that He should call me to this 
 work — I, who look so unfitted for it. Perhaps He, who doesn't see 
 as we see, sees a fitness in me for it which you cannot see, and 
 which I do not feeL I sometimes read a passage which vou all 
 
 14—2 
 
212 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 know, "He hath chosen the weak things of this world, and the 
 foolish things, and the base things hath God chosen, and the things 
 that are despised," and then I say to myself, " That's why He has 
 chosen me." ' 
 
 Harvard was the next speaker — an address of few words, and to 
 the purpose, hitting out straight from the shoulder. 
 
 ' You've seen my friend,' he began, ' and he's told you what drink 
 did for him, and what profit he had in those things whereof he is 
 now ashamed, and now you see me ;' and he showed his magnificent 
 frame, tall and straight, and clean-limbed, and with the strength of 
 a giant ; ' and I am going to tell you, or show you rather, what 
 temperance — spell it with a big " T," if you please — has done for 
 me.' 
 
 He told it in a very few words, for his audience were getting 
 impatient. 
 
 ' How long have 'ee taken the pledge, mister ?' inquired a voice 
 from the crowd. 
 
 ' I haven't taken it at all,' he answered ; ' at least, I have taken a 
 higher pledge ;' and he raised his eyes with that upward look in 
 them which is the one outward sign of his particular order. He did 
 it quite naturally and involuntarily. 
 
 ' How long have 'ee tried it, eh, mister ? Not long, I'll be 
 bound,' remarked another voice from the crowd. 
 
 ' I've never tried anything else,' Harvard answered quietly. ' I 
 have never tasted a drop of intoxicating liquor in my life. And if 
 you want to see what cold water will do for a man, how it will 
 make his body healthy, vigorous, and strong, how it will keep his 
 brain cool and clear, and strengthen his muscles, fitting him for the 
 battle of life, I shall be very happy to put on the gloves and spar 
 with anyone present, as the champion of the cause I advocate — 
 Temperance versus Alcohol.' 
 
 He suited the action to the word, and threw off his academical 
 gown and coat and stood before them in his flannels, and a thin silk 
 vest that showed every muscle and every tough sinew of his mag- 
 nificent frame. 
 
 There was a movement in the crowd, and the champion of Barn- 
 well came forward — a big hulking fellow, with the strength of a 
 giant and the coarse, bull-dog countenance of his species. He 
 undressed deliberately, and when he stood naked to the waist a 
 noarse murmur ran through the audience, and Herbert exchanged 
 A rapid glance with Jayne, who nodded back encouragingly. 
 
 Herbert didn't like the look of him. Evidently he had been 
 trained professionally in the noble art of self-defence, and he had 
 the physical strength of a bull, and the crowd were cheering him at 
 the top of their lungs as he came slouching up the platform. 
 
 Harvard measured his antagonist in a glance— plenty of muscle^ 
 some rude skill, and the strength of a bull. He played very steadily 
 at first, and kept on the defensive. The man was out of training,. 
 
'SPARRING.' 2I 3 
 
 and his movements were slow and awkward, but he had the tre- 
 mendous advantage of weight and superior strength. 
 
 He fought with indomitable pluck and obstinacy, but he lacKea 
 thfquickness, decision and endurance of ^s antagonist and he 
 winded himse f in his futile efforts to get at him. Once he had 
 To call hSE? and a dull roar went round the room from his 
 
 ^Hatard made no attack, but he held himself ! well together -and 
 kept on his legs, and his length of arm gave him the advantage 
 
 ta SJ£KTrf5» Barnwell champion encouraged Mm in true 
 Barnwell fashion, and the murmur had risen to an ominous roar 
 
 STvard was too well aware of his antagonist's bullish power to 
 come within^his reach, but he had his work quite out out to avoid 
 his inSes With the rapidity of thought he eluded his opponent 
 ever? time keeping his elbows well down to his sides so as to be 
 abS^Ht'sSghterand quicker when the time came; but that 
 aidn't come very often, and Barnwell, getting hot and furious^ and 
 careless of ! guarding, by-and-by made a terrific lunge, which 
 Harvard aVofded ; and, not meeting with the expected resistance, 
 SeLg bully over-balanced himself, and fell heavily forward on his 
 
 fa Igain that roar, sullen no longer but furious, rose from the 
 crowd that bv this time had filled the room to suffocation, and 
 Sel women, and children were jumbled together m one heaving 
 
 "jayne looked anxiously across the sea of angry • fac* ito the 
 women Why hadn't they gone out when he told them to t it 
 was too late ^ talk of goilg out now, and Tommy's little orotner 
 had already had enough of it, and was beginning to cry. 
 
 Oh why had he ever consented to this mad scheme ? Why had 
 he ever listened to these young enthusiasts, and brought this 
 reproach on the mission and the cause ? 
 
 It was too late to ask any of these questions now. There w-s a 
 madman on the platform and an infuriated mob below. 
 
 a th?nk our friend here has proved the endurance and staying 
 
 power that ' Jayne began ; but his words were drowned m a 
 
 volley of hoarse cries, mingled freely with execrations : 
 
 «Go at him, Billl' 'Finish him off!' 'Fair play! fair 
 
 P ^Fair play, by all means !' said Harvard, coming forward. ' Come 
 on a^ain, if you haven't had enough !' 
 
 Enraged and excited by the cries of the crowd that was surging 
 wildlv around the platform, Barnwell came on. - 
 
 This time his rush was fast and furious, but Harvard, who had 
 read his man pretty accurately, was expectag it and me t him 
 with a steady counter. On he came again, baffled, but mo e furious 
 Than before, ani more off his guard ; but Harvard had seen that 
 
214 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 when he was foiled, and he fell savagely back, he was shifting his 
 glove. 
 
 There was a little gleam of humour, or determination, or both, 
 in the American's blue eyes, that flashed as cold and as keen as steel 
 blades as he advanced to meet the infuriated giant, who came forward 
 again with a wild rush, his eyes bloodshot and his head down, and 
 the muscles and sinews of his great bull neck standing out like 
 cords. Harvard met this hasty advance by a sudden side-movement, 
 half spring, half step, not only eluding his opponent's terrific charge, 
 but, his feet being at right angles to the lines in which he formerly 
 stood, the incautious champion of Barnwell and alcohol tripped 
 over his leg and fell heavily to the ground. He lay there stunned 
 for some moments, and a hoarse cry arose from the crowd. 
 
 Some one called ' time,' but still the champion of Barnwell lay 
 where he fell, a still, inert, purple, senseless mass. He had fallen 
 on his head, which, bullock -fashion, he had kept persistently 
 forward. 
 
 A wild yell rose from the crowd below, and in a moment the 
 struggling, swearing mob came surging up the steps of the platform. 
 Harvard threw off the gloves and hastily resumed his coat and 
 waistcoat. He had scarcely time to put on his gown before it was 
 seized by a dozen hands and rent from his grasp. This was a 
 signal for a general melee, and the gownsmen found themselves in 
 a moment the centre of an infuriated mob. 
 
 Jayne stood up in the midst blandly waving his hand for silence, 
 and Brown began feebly to quaver the first few notes of a hymn. 
 But it was no use ; the rowdy element was in the ascendant. After 
 one or two ineffectual efforts he gave it up and looked anxiously 
 among the crowd at the women and children, who were gathered up 
 in a frightened heap. 
 
 There was no way out but the one narrow entrance, and the more 
 timid, seeing a row inevitable, struggled for the door, while the 
 crowd surged wildly up on the platform, and, with fierce cries and 
 execrations, surrounded the gownsmen. Barnwell meanwhile had 
 recovered himself and risen, and was shouting wildly to Harvard to 
 ' Come on ! come on !' 
 
 ' No, we have had enough for to-night,' said Harvard good- 
 naturedly ; ' you have fought very well ; but you see water is 
 better than beer.' 
 
 The end of the sentence was drowned in a roar from the mob, 
 who had closed around him, and were trying their best to drag his 
 jown off his back. 
 
 ' It wasn't fair ! another round ! another round !' they shouted ; 
 ' he's funking it !' 
 
 ' No,' said Harvard decidedly ; ' no more. I see I have made a 
 mistake in having this contest at all. But I am not funking it by 
 any means.' 
 
 Quite good-naturedly, and with as little force as was necessary, he 
 
'sparring: 2 is 
 
 released himself from the arms of the bystanders, while Jayne 
 mumbled a few quite inaudible words in the midst of a frightful 
 din, and declared the meeting over. 
 
 It was one thing to close the meeting, and it was another to leave 
 the hall, and when the gownsmen leapt over the platform, as the 
 ordinary approach was blocked, they were in the midst of a fighting, 
 struggling, panting crowd, that closed ominously around them. 
 
 Someone, no doubt with the best intentions, at this critical 
 moment put out the gas. What happened after they couldn't very 
 well tell, as the crowd had come between them, and they were 
 divided and borne along through the darkness, wedged in amid a 
 mass of struggling, panting humanity. Harvard only remembered 
 one thing : that he had got hold of Jayne, and that if he relaxed 
 his hold one moment the cripple would be under the feet of this 
 reckless, infuriated mob. 
 
 He held on like grim death, and he carried him through them all 
 into the outer air, faint and white, with tattered gown and his cap 
 flattened over his face. 
 
 Harvard dragged him out and propped him up against a wall 
 until he recovered himself, and could gasp out : 
 
 ' Quite a mistake, well meant, but quite a mistake. I ought 
 never to have agreed to it.' 
 
 "While Jayne was feebly bewailing the lamentable issue of the 
 meeting, Herbert was guarding Tommy's little brother and his ex- 
 cited parent through the crowd. She, with true feminine instinct, 
 threatened to faint or to go off into hysterics directly she found she 
 had a strong protector ; but she didn't do either when she found 
 herself outside in the air with Tommy's little brother clinging 
 wildly to her for protection. Brown turned up directly after with 
 two mothers in Barnwell under his arms, but his gown was nearly 
 torn off his back. 
 
 The first voice he heard outside, when he had forced a path for 
 himself and the women through the crowd, was a very familiar 
 voice, which demanded in suave accents the oft-repeated request : 
 
 ' Your names and your colleges, gentlemen ?' 
 
 The crowd set up a derisive shout, while, breathless and panting 
 from the melee, the undergraduates gave the required information. 
 
 ' You will go to your colleges at once,' said the Senior Proctor 
 severely. 
 
 4 "We were just going, sir, as fast as we could,' said Brown 
 humbly. 
 
 Harvard and Jayne escaped, but Brown and Herbert were 
 proctorijed and ' gated ' for a fortnight. 
 
ai6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 BROWN OF TRINITY. 
 
 1 Doors where my heart was used to heat 
 So quickly ' 
 
 Perhaps it was quite as well for Brown that he should be kept 
 in durance vile, otherwise ' gated,' during those momentous week 
 preceding the examination. 
 
 This disgraceful row in Barnwell was the talk of the college, and 
 the Dean and tutors looked at the culprits with an uneasy suspicion. 
 Had Brown really broken out again, and had he taken Flowers with 
 him? 
 
 Boxing in Barnwell forsooth, and the credit of the college at 
 stake I 
 
 Nobody believed Jayne when he assured his friends that he was 
 at the bottom of it, that the blame was wholly his. No wonder 
 they were politely and good-naturedly incredulous. 
 
 Jayne with the gloves on ! He didn't look much of a figure for 
 it, at any rate. 
 
 If the meeting had no other results, it had indirectly borne 
 good fruit in one way ; it had driven Brown back to his 
 books. 
 
 ' You must make no mistake this time, Brown,' Herbert had 
 said to him. ' You mustn't get plucked again. Remember, this 
 is your last chance !' 
 
 Brown remembered it so far as to take his books with him when 
 he sculled up the river, and then, lying in the bottom of the boat, 
 or stretched out on the grass by the bank, did his reading as 
 seriously as the circumstances would permit. It was not a very 
 serious way to go about it, but however gloomily, as a nation, 
 Englishmen take their pleasures, as a University Cambridge takep 
 its education pleasantly. 
 
 In a boat moored up under the bank, lightly arrayed in parti- 
 coloured flannels, with a book on his knees, Mr. Brown read 
 through the sweet May mornings preceding the examinations. Of 
 course he might have been reading hard overnight, and had only 
 come down here to get cool before he began to read seriously 
 again ; but his friends shook their heads and remonstrated with 
 him. To do him justice, he really did apply himself, as the fateful 
 days approached, with more than usual vigour. Even Herbert 
 allowed this, and he had great doubts about him. 
 
 On the last day, which was the hottest day of the term, he 
 ?ported his oak till night, and came out looking so damp and limp, 
 
BROWN OF TRINITY. 217 
 
 and white and nervous, that the men averred that he had Bat in his 
 bath all day, and poured cold water over himself while he wa*> 
 reading. 
 
 Jayne took him for a walk round the Backs, and made him 
 listen to the nightingales, and wouldn't hear a word about his 
 work ; and after reading to him out of his little black book, made 
 him go straight to bed. 
 
 He was white and nervous the next morning, but Jayne limped 
 beside him to the door of the schools where the examination was 
 held. In answer to his friends' inquiries how he had done, he 
 answered despondently, and with evident sincerity : 
 
 ' Couldn't have done worse !' 
 
 The next day brought the same tale, and so on to the end. 
 When he came back on the last day, and it was all over, he was 
 pale but resigned. 
 
 1 Fact is,' he said, ' I have quite made up my mind to accept 
 either success or failure as the best thing for me. Perhaps, after 
 all, failure is the discipline I need — God knows !' and he took off 
 Lis cap, with his simple face beaming, and for the first time 
 Herbert saw in his eyes that shining upward look that he saw in 
 Jayne's and Harvard's, as if this weak creature, disciplined by 
 repeated failures and disasters, had at last found out where to looi' 
 for the strength he lacked. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Brown simply, ' I am quite prepared for the worst 
 I'm sorry for the poor old governor, but he'll get over it by-and* 
 by, when he sees how much better I am for it.' 
 
 With this consoling reflection Brown put all his papers away 
 out of sight, and recommenced operations in Barnwell. 
 
 A strange thing happened about this time. A letter, written in 
 a firm, beautiful, characteristic lady's hand, that Herbert seemed 
 to remember, lay on his table one morning among a heap of too 
 familiar letters in nasty suggestive blue envelopes. 
 
 He turned it over and opened it shyly, with quite a little flutter 
 in his heart. Who could this unknown correspondent be ? 
 
 The letter was from Mary Barclay, and she had written to ask 
 Herbert, in confidence, a strange question. What could she do for 
 his friend Brown ? 
 
 He showed this letter to Jayne, and they talked the matter over 
 together, and they agreed that nothing could be done for Brown 
 at present, not until he had taken his degree, if he should be so 
 lucky as to get through ; and then, if he took orders, Miss 
 Barclay's influence might obtain him some preferment. 
 
 Herbert wrote very modestly back to the lady explaining this, 
 and promising to acquaint her when the time arrived for helping 
 Brown in the way that he and Jayne had decided that Brown was 
 to be helped. 
 
 But Mary Barclay was not to be put off so easily. By the 
 following post a letter arrived requesting Herbert, if he had no 
 
218 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 examinations going on, and he could spare the day, to come up 
 without delay, and call upon her at her house in town. 
 
 1 Of course you will go,' said Jayne. 
 
 Herbert blushingly acknowledged that he had not the money to 
 pay his railway fare ; that last six and eightpence to the Proctor, 
 after the Barnwell escapade, had emptied his slender purse. 
 
 Jayne's purse, by no means a plethoric one, had a great many 
 calls upon it ; but it was always at the service of a friend, so 
 Herbert's objection was speedily overruled. Jayne looked him 
 over when he was equipped for the journey, and he made him take 
 it the very same day, and supplemented Herbert's toilet with a 
 new silk tie of his own and a pair of cuffs that were not fringed at 
 the ends, and thus smartened he limped beside him down to the 
 railway-station. 
 
 What could she be going to do for Brown ? 
 
 Mary Barclay lived in a very select London neighbourhood, 
 abutting on one of the parks. The house was so grand, and the 
 flunkey airing himself beneath the vast portico was so magnificent 
 a person, that Herbert blushed and trembled before him while he 
 inquired modestly if Miss Barclay happened to live there. She 
 did happen, and the superior creature, after looking Herbert all 
 over with a scornful don't-think-much-of-you air, led the way into 
 the vestibule, while he ascertained if his mistress happened to be 
 in to a very seedy-looking young man from the country. Herbert 
 hadn't a card, and he sent in his name modestly as ' Flowers of 
 Trinity.' 
 
 While he stood airing himself on the mat the inner door opened, 
 and disclosed a line of powdered footmen, and an interior the like 
 of which Herbert had never before beheld. 
 
 The glories of Bratton Court paled before it ; the stately mag- 
 nificence of Trinity Lodge, that struck awe into Herbert's heart, 
 was as nothing compared to it. There were no marble columns 
 at the Lodge, but there were gleaming columns here that might 
 have been brought from the temple of Mausolus, and a marble 
 floor worthy of the Parthenon, and a long vista of palms and 
 exotics, and rich hangings, and noble statues, and a faint over- 
 powering odour of wealth and ease that went direct to his lean, 
 starved undergraduate soul. 
 
 ' And Geraint was sacrificing all this for Hebe Bellenden !' 
 
 All this, when he had only seen the beginning of it — the brief 
 preface before the story opens ! 
 
 He had not to air himself on the mat very long before that inner 
 door was again thrown open, and he stood on the marble floor, 
 amid those magnificent creatures who eyed him superciliously as 
 he passed (and his highlows made a dreadful noise on the marble 
 pavement), and a stately presence in black came half-way across 
 the hall to greet him. 
 
 ' Oh. Mr. Flowers, this is so kind of you !' Mary Barclay said, aa 
 
BROWN OF TRINITY. 219 
 
 ihe shook him warmly by the hand, and led him into a room 
 beyond. 
 
 It was a lady's morning-room, and it was full of sunshine and 
 flowers, and opened out upon a veranda, beyond which, stretching 
 away into a wooded park, lay a close-shaven lawn, bordered with 
 parterres of lovely flowers, and redolent with the perfume of the 
 first breath of June. 
 
 Surely this was fairyland ? Herbert had never been there, not 
 even in his dreams, but this was the nearest approach he had ever 
 seen to it. 
 
 He put down his shabby hat, and he took off his shabby gloves, 
 and he resigned himself to the intoxication of the moment. 
 
 But even then, with all this sense of strangeness and unreality, 
 he remarked how changed Mary Barclay was since he had last seen 
 her in Geraint's rooms at Trinity. She was handsomer than ever, 
 with a cold, proud beauty, and a sadness in her eyes that went to his 
 heart. The freshness of her beauty was gone, but he saw in it 
 what he had not seen there before, in the lovely face in the locked 
 photograph on Geraint's table, in the stony, tearless face at 
 Geraint's grave — a saddened, softened light. 
 
 ' It is very kind of you to come to me so soon/ she said. ' I 
 wanted very much to talk to you. I am deeply interested in your 
 friend Mr. Brown. I cannot wait till he takes his degree ; I 
 cannot wait until he is ordained ; I want to help him now.' 
 
 Herbert looked round the fairy bower where the wealth of 
 Aladdin might have been lavished. He could not doubt her power 
 to help Brown ; but how ? 
 
 He sat silent ; he had no suggestion to make. She couldn't 
 possibly give him money, and Geraint had already paid his debts. 
 And then he remembered the night school, and the row in Barn- 
 well, and how abortive had been their well-meaning attempts to 
 help the people. He told her, quite irrelevantly, all about it, very 
 diffidently at first, and with some little hesitation. 
 
 It was not exactly a subject for a morning call. She listened to 
 the end ; and when Herbert got warm, and dwelt in glowing terms 
 on Harvard's prowess, and the defeat of the big giant — the advocate 
 of drink and ignorance — she smiled, and tears trembled in her eyes. 
 
 1 So like him/ she said softly ; ' I must know this brave American 
 friend of yours, Mr. Flowers.' 
 
 ' He's a splendid fellow !' said Herbert warmly ; ' he's like 
 Geraint.' 
 
 'I'm sure he is,' she said quietly. 'He is like — like he would 
 have been had he any cause to advocate.' 
 
 And then, sitting there in the warm June sunshine, with that 
 sense of rest and ease, he told her that other story of Brown's 
 disaster — he didn't dwell much upon his own share in it — and of 
 the vengeance that Geraint and Harvard executed upon the offender 
 in the Great Court of King's. 
 
mo A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 The sunshine was streaming in upon her as she sat amid her 
 flowers by the open window, and it touched the tears that dropped 
 from her eyes. Not knowing that Herbert saw them, she set her- 
 self quietly to get the better of them. 
 
 'It was well done ; it was splendidly done !' she said, with just a 
 little quaver in her voice. ' I must see this brave friend of yours — 
 of his. When can I come ? When can I know him ? When you 
 know me better, Mr. Flowers, you will understand my impatience. 
 I can never bear to wait. I have been humoured, spoiled, all my 
 life. I have had everything I wanted, and directly I wanted it. I 
 have never known what disappointment or denial meant — until 
 now.' 
 
 She stopped suddenly, and the hard stony look that Herbert 
 remembered in the first hours of her grief came over her beautiful 
 face. 
 
 ' Why not come down in the May Week and see Harvard take 
 his degree V Herbert said innocently. ' He is sure to take a high 
 place, he is such a splendid fellow I' 
 
 And then he, too, stopped abruptly. He had not told her that 
 Harvard was in the fatal boat whose iron prow had spitted Geraint 
 through the heart, but he remembered it at that moment, and 
 groaned inwardly at having mentioned him to her. 
 
 She did not notice his silence, but went on talking of Brown and 
 his affairs. 
 
 ' I want to know all about him,' she said, ' and about his family ; 
 the poor old father you have told me about, who was so disap- 
 pointed in him. I have a Bishop coming to luncheon to-day, and 
 — and I may be able to do something for him.' 
 
 So Herbert told her all about Brown patronus, and the large 
 family, and the small means, and the little vicarage-house, and 
 tender-hearted Mrs. Brown, who was starving herself and pinching 
 the housekeeping to keep her son at Cambridge. She listened 
 patiently ; doubtless she had heard the same story hundreds of 
 times before, for every post brought her begging letters from impe- 
 cunious members of every learned profession. 
 
 She didn't say much, but she sighed when he had finished, and 
 luncheon being announced, she led the way silently into the dining- 
 room. 
 
 If Herbert had been impressed by the wealth and luxury dis- 
 played in the simple morning-room, he was speechless and be- 
 wildered as he passed through the noble suite of reception-rooms to 
 the dining-room where the luncheon was served. 
 
 He had read of such scenes as this, he had caught passing 
 glimpses between the portieres of Lady Millicent's drawing-room ; 
 but to tread a welcome guest amid such splendour made his foolish 
 heart stand still. The thick pile of the carpets drowned the dread- 
 ful sound of his highlows (he wore iron tips to his heels for 
 economy), and there were no mirrors on the walls or plate-glass 
 
BROWN OF TRINITY. iz\ 
 
 panels to the doors, to reflect his frayed waistcoat and the baggy 
 knees of his trousers. Mary Barclay hated looking-glasses ; she was 
 weary enough of herself without seeing herself reflected from every 
 wall, and given back by every door, so every inch of plate-glass had 
 been removed, except old-fashioned mirrors, that flattened, and 
 broadened, and diminished anyone who was rash enough to look 
 into them in a manner that was not conducive to personal vanity. 
 
 The looking-glasses had been replaced by priceless pictures, and 
 the walls all round the lofty reception-rooms were hung with 
 choice examples of old masters. The furniture was handsome and 
 decorative, but it did not strike Herbert as being like anything he 
 had ever seen before. There were whole suites of elaborately- 
 carved furniture of Chippendale's best period, and cabinets that 
 would have made a collector's mouth water, full of the rarest old 
 china. 
 
 ' This,' said Mary Barclay, stopping before a dainty cabinet, ' is 
 my dear father's collection of Old English china.' 
 
 She pointed out to him as she spoke a suite of rare vases of old 
 Worcester, with the deep-blue scale ground, and a set of old Chelsea 
 figures of the seasons ; and a cabinet full of shepherds and shep- 
 herdesses, with crooks, and sportive lambs, and garlands of flowers ; 
 ~>nd a perfect Olympus of heathen gods and goddesses : Xeptunes 
 with tridents, Junos with peacocks, Minervas, Mercurys, Dianas, 
 Mars, Joves in brilliant array. 
 
 But Herbert had not eyes for any of these divinities ; he had 
 caught sight of a small mild-eyed Chelsea Cupid behind all these, 
 and he tremblingly brought it forward and feasted his hungry eyes 
 upon it. 
 
 ' Ah,' said Mary Barclay, watching him with & swift sympathy 
 in her eyes, ' you have seen that before ?' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert huskily. He was thinking of the little 
 mother and the bare best parlour of the cottage at Bidef ord. ' Yes, 
 I know it quite well. I have never seen but one like it, on our 
 mantelpiece at home. My mother valued it so much, dear little 
 fellow ! I knocked its head off when I was a child, and I remember 
 her crying when she picked it up, and I cried too, and would not 
 be comforted. I was so sorry for it.' 
 
 He had forgotten the magnificent room and the heiress by his 
 side, and was back again in that bare cottage at Bideford — a 
 child again, weeping with the little mother over the little 
 broken Chelsea boy. The remembrance of those happy, innocent 
 days, when they wept and rejoiced together, brought a mist before 
 bis eyes as he replaced the Cupid with a sigh. 
 
 Mary Barclay saw the gathering mist, but she did not hear the 
 sigh. 
 
 ' Your mother ?' she repeated softly. ' Is she still living ?' 
 
 1 Yes,' he answered eagerly. ' Oh, yes, thank Cod !' 
 
 He followed her through the rest of the rooms in silence. He had 
 
222 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 no eyes for the treasures of Sevres and Dresden that were 
 scattered about in profusion on the dainty Louis Seize tables and 
 commodes. He had ceased to be bewildered by the magnificence 
 around him. He had forgotten all about his noisy highlows and 
 his shiny coat. He only remembered the little mother at Bideford. 
 He only thought how a millionth portion of all this weary grandeur 
 would bring peace and joy into her lean famished lot. 
 
 He was still thinking these vain, foolish thoughts as he entered 
 the great gloomy dining-room where Mary Barclay was talking to 
 some guests who had just arrived. She introduced Herbert to the 
 great man who wore an apron in everyday life ; and by-and-by he 
 was so preoccupied that he mistook the butler, who was a much 
 more solemn and magnificent person, for the great and shining light 
 of the English Church. 
 
 The table was loaded with silver, and there was gold plate on the 
 sideboard, and the luncheon was served by a vast and voiceless army 
 in hair-powder and silk stockings. 
 
 Herbert was very glad when the meal was over. He didn't 
 enjoy it half so much as his college Hall, and the voiceless ones 
 carried away his plate long before he had finished. The Bishop 
 said a very short grace, and walked with Miss Barclay on the lawn 
 after luncheon, and Herbert heard him making little clerical jokes 
 the entire length of two greenhouses. 
 
 Just before the Bishop left, his hostess came over to Herbert, 
 who was gazing helplessly at a great flowering, prickly aloe, in a 
 conservatory full of tropical plants, and trying to summon up 
 courage to go, and asked him for the address of Brown patronus. 
 He had nothing but tradesmen's bills in his pocket to write it on, 
 and he blushed dreadfully as he tore off a little corner of one — there 
 was really no help for it — and wrote the familiar address. 
 
 He went away soon after the Bishop, but before he went Mary 
 Barclay put the little Chelsea Cupid in his hands. 
 
 ' Keep this,' she said, ' in remembrance of your visit. It will 
 recall to you the little figure of your childhood that your mother 
 wept over. I shall always love a Chelsea Cupid for her sake.' 
 
 He put the little figure on his bare mantelpiece when he got 
 back to Trinity, and Jayne, when he told the tale, called it a trophy 
 of his visit. But he didn't tell Jayne all, or half that he had seen. 
 He had an uneasy sense that it would sound unreal and inflated, 
 so that Jayne looked upon his visit, on the whole, as a failure. 
 But to Brown he said nothing. It would have been cruel to excite 
 the fervid imagination of this dreamer of dreams. Besides, his 
 mind was already full of Barnwell. The night school was a great 
 success, and several of the bigger boys, moved with admiration of 
 the prowess of the temperance champion, whose doughty deed was 
 still a favourite theme in Barnwell, came forward and signed the 
 pledge. 
 
 Brown was so full of the work that he had ceased to hang about 
 
BROWN OF TRINITY. 223 
 
 the Senate-house doors waiting for the lists. There were so many 
 lists to be hnng out now, fresh ones every morning, and again often 
 at night, but the list of the men who had passed the Special and 
 were eligible for the Poll degree had not yet appeared. 
 
 Brown gave a general look down the papers on the doors before 
 he started on his evening work, a few nights after Herbert's fruit- 
 less visit, bat the paper he looked for was not there. 
 
 When he came back some hours after there was quite a crowd 
 round the gates of the Senate-house, which were closed for the 
 night, and a man inside, who had climbed over the railings, was 
 reading the list that had recently been put out, by the light of a 
 match. 
 
 'What list is it ?' Brown asked anxiously of a bystander. 
 
 1 Oh, the Special.' 
 
 1 Oh,' said Brown nervously, pressing his small round face through 
 the bars in a wild endeavour to see twenty feet off in the dark ; 
 ' would you mind telling me, please, if a friend of mine, Brown of 
 Trinity, is in the list ?' 
 
 ' Where is he likely to be ?' asked the man inside, lighting 
 another match. 
 
 ' Oh, near the end.' 
 
 'No, he isn't here.' And Brown, with whitening face, turned 
 xilently away. 
 
 'Here, stop!' There waB a hand on his shoulder, a not un- 
 friendly undergraduate hand. ' Did you say Brown ¥ 
 
 ' Yes, Brown of Trinity.' 
 
 ' Oh, there's some mistake. I'm sure I heard it read out.' 
 
 The poor trembling fellow turns back, and with a white face 
 pressed between the bars, asks the man inside very humbly if he 
 has found the name of Brown. 
 
 ' Yes ; confound it !' answers the man, burning his fingers with 
 the match. 'Why didn't you say where the fellow was likely to 
 be, instead of dragging me through this confounded long list with 
 a lucifer match? Brown of Trinity is top of the second class. 
 Oh, hang it!' 
 
 The match had burnt itself quite out, and the man's fingers too, 
 and Brown of Trinity turned thankfully away from the gate of 
 the Senate-house, with his heart bumping dreadfully, and a mist 
 before his eyes that blurrsd all the gas-lamps in King's Parade. 
 
224 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 A MILLION OF MONEY. 
 
 An inner force had changed the blue 
 Of his old gown ; from cap to shoe 
 Hung mantling folds of sable hue. 
 He tied his strings, like silk they show'd. 
 Through court and cloister, street and road, 
 A living bachelor he strode.' 
 
 Mary Barclay came down earlier than Herbert expected. She 
 eame down on the morning of the day when the prize poems were 
 recited at the Senate-house. Herbert did not see her until he had 
 ascended the rostrum, and was reciting the Greek ode for which he 
 had been adjudged the Chancellor's gold medal. 
 
 Looking round at a pause in the rhythmic Creek, he saw the 
 pale face of Mary Barclay in the crowd below. It was not the f Bee 
 he was looking for ; that paler, gentler face, with a sad pity in the 
 clear gray eyes that was almost cruel, was in the Doctor's Gallery 
 beyond, and Mary Barclay came before it. He paused and blushed 
 in his ridiculous way, and the men in the gallery shouted, ' Go on !' 
 ' Don't be afraid !' ' Nobody's listening !' and other cheerful and 
 encouraging remarks. 
 
 Herbert went on at a rapid pace for such a solemn measure, and 
 stepped down from the rostrum amid a storm of applause from the 
 (veil-filled galleries of the Senate-house. He hadn't bought a new 
 coat this time, and the knees of his trousers k>oked baggier than evei 
 as he went up alone through the long file of visitors, exposed to a 
 double broadside of bright eyes criticising the classic poet on whom, 
 f orthesecond time,had descended the coveted bays of the University. 
 
 He need not have blushed so dreadfully as he came back, amid a 
 delightful round of applause, bearing the Chancellor's gold medal ; 
 nobody was looking at his trousers. There was such an unaccount- 
 »ble mist before the eyes of the Trinity Lily that she couldn't have 
 seen them if she were looking, and Mary Barclay was thinking of 
 his mother. 
 
 She sent for him after the ceremony to the Bull Hotel, and asked 
 him to take her to the fountain at King's. 
 
 She sent him back to his rooms to fetch his medal, which he had 
 been too modest to bring, and she was delighted with it, and as 
 proud over it, as if she had been — well — his sister. 
 
 ' You will be a great man some day, Mr. Flowers ; you are a 
 great man, indeed, already. You have won the two most coveted 
 distinctions in the University. A brilliant career lies before you. 
 You will be a Fellow of Trinity !' 
 
A MILLION OF MONEY. 225 
 
 4 A Fellow of Trinity !' 
 
 Herbert kept repeating it to himself as he knelt a few hours later 
 beside his distinguished visitor in the carven stalls of King's ChapeL 
 Success, distinction, a brilliant career ! These words had never 
 fallen on his ears before. He had plodded on without encourage- 
 ment through all these months — years — without a friendly hand 
 to help him on, without a friendly voice to whisper in his ear, ' Well 
 done !' The soft voice of praise was a stranger to him, and its 
 delicious murmur thrilled his veins with unutterable sweetness. 
 
 He was an exceptionally foolish and impressionable under- 
 graduate. 
 
 Herbert had never sat in the stalls of King's Chapel before. 
 The discriminating verger does not put seedy looking gownsmen 
 with frayed waistcoats into seats of honour. The music, always 
 noble, sounded to him nobler, and the wonderful nave, with the 
 awesome roof, had never struck him before with the sublimity of 
 its aim — ill-matched as men are wont to call it, viewing the scanty 
 band of white-robed scholars below. 
 
 The June sunshine streamed through the flaming robes of the 
 prophets pictured on the panes of the wondrous painted windows 
 of King's, and through the deep azure of the skies, in which the 
 men of old depicted the heaven they so intensely realized. The old 
 Perpendicular blue of the storied windows flecked the marble floor 
 of the chapel as they walked slowly out, with the notes of the noble 
 organ welling around them, and lingering on, as if loth to die, as 
 they stood beside the fountain in the Great Court. 
 
 ' It was well done !' said Mary Barclay, as she turned away from 
 the scene of Geraint's self-constituted vengeance ; ' it was nobly 
 done !' 
 
 Herbert introduced Harvard to her, by her own request, and 
 Jayne ; but she did not want to see Mr. Brown yet. She gave 
 them some coffee after Hall, in the sitting-room she had engaged at 
 the Bull Hotel, and she waited upon them herself. 
 
 Harvard was full of fresh schemes for Barnwell, he had so much 
 enthusiasm and vitality. The sparring-match hadn't been a failure, 
 after all. At least a dozen lads had come forward since, as a direct 
 result of it, and enrolled themselves under the blue banner of the 
 Good Templars. 
 
 He was only trying his 'prentice hana here in Cambridge ; he 
 would take a larger field by-and-by — Americans always do take 
 large fields — and convert a continent. 
 
 It seemed to Herbert that he could do anything he would, as he 
 Bat there at the open window of the Bull, looking out into the 
 summer night, with his splendid enthusiasm, and eagerness, and 
 strength for success and conquest. And Mary Barclay, with her 
 quick sympathy, had brought it all to the front. Jayne was 
 satisfied with Barnwell ; but Harvard was already yearning for 
 £ larger field. She listened with a patient, abstracted air while 
 
 15 
 
226 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Jayne told her all his little plans ; but her face flushed and changed 
 with the changes in his voice as Harvard poured out to her willing 
 ears all his wider schemes. 
 
 She went to the Senate-house the next day to see him take his 
 degree ; and she congratulated him, with a strange wistfulness in 
 her eyes, when, ' armed with his dainty ribbon- tied degree,' he took 
 his seat, amid the frantic cheering of his friends, upon the bench, 
 by her side. 
 
 Herbert, who was thinking of Geraint, whose place he filled, was 
 looking down upon them from the overflowing gallery above, with 
 a strange question in his heart : ' Was he right in bringing them 
 together ?' 
 
 Brown did not take his degree till the day after the honours men. 
 He took it with the Hoi Polloi. He was thankful enough to take 
 it in any company. He had a dreadful dream the night before the 
 degrees were conferred, and he came over to Herbert's room, with 
 a look of dismay on his simple old face, before chapel, to ask him 
 whether he believed in dreams. 
 
 He had dreamed that the Yice-Chancellor, and the Esquire Bedell 
 — with the silver mace packed in a despatch-box — and the Proctors, 
 had been summoned hastily to confer degrees at a university in 
 Central Africa. 
 
 But when the auspicious moment arrived, and Brown, in a white 
 fur bachelor's hood, and two innocent little white bands, trem« 
 blingly ascended the Senate-house steps, the Vice- Chancellor was 
 already there — and the Esquire Bedell was there — and the 
 silver mace was there — and the Senior Proctor was there, 
 with a twinkle in his eye, as if he thought he had seen Brown 
 before. 
 
 And somebody else was there. Not Maria. Oh no ; not Maria ! 
 Brown's father was there, and Mrs. Brown, and Brown's sister^ 
 rounder, and plumper, and ever so much more interesting thai 
 Brown. At least Cudworth said so, and he ought to be aa 
 authority, as he had already taken them through all the colleges, 
 and over all the bridges, and inside all the churches in Cambridge, 
 that very morning. 
 
 Brown's father said it was the happiest day of his life. And he 
 looked like it, with that expression of supreme pride and happines3 
 on his worn face, when his son knelt down before the Vice-Chan- 
 cellor. No doubt Mrs. Brown's countenance would have expressed 
 the same satisfaction, but it was buried in her pocket-handkerchief, 
 and she never saw what she had travelled a hundred miles to see — 
 she only saw a moving rainbow, in which the scarlet of the Vice- 
 Chancellor's gown and the white fur of Brown's hood were the 
 prevailing hues, and swam before her in an undignified Catherine 
 wheel. 
 
 Mary Barclay's eyes were wet with tears as she saw the simpH 
 fellow, whom everybody greeted with a genuine warmth with 
 
A MILLION OF MONEY. 227 
 
 which they had not greeted better men, take his place on the bench 
 beside his happy people. 
 
 Happy people indeed ! 
 
 For only that morning the offer had reached Brown patronus, 
 from a Bishop who had suddenly discovered his merits, of a rich 
 living in the fat and flourishing Midlands, and his old friends and 
 college chums were crowding round him, as he came through the 
 gate of Trinity, to congratulate him on this preferment. 
 
 He remembered how he had passed beneath that gate, not so long 
 ago, with not a friendly hand to clasp, not a friendly voice to cheer 
 him, and how the men who were crowding round him now had 
 passed by on the other side of the quad. 
 
 It is quite true : nothing succeeds like success ! 
 
 Everybody had heard of it by some means, and Cudworth, 
 coming up the stairs brimful of it, pitched his cap over a ridiculous 
 Japanese screen that Brown had put in front of his door, as he 
 kept it open during the hot weather for ventilation, about the 
 place that Brown usually sat, with a delightful variation of the old 
 refrain : 
 
 ' Oh, Kicklebury Brown I oh, Kicklebury Brown ! 
 What a lucky old man you are V 
 
 But it wasn't lucky for Cudworth ; for the chair had been moved 
 that Brown usually occupied, and a table, with all the cups and 
 saucers he could borrow on the staircase, stood in its place, and his 
 cap flopped down in the middle of them. 
 
 He had to go in and get it, but, oh, it was such a happy day ! 
 He picked up the pieces and he stayed to tea. 
 
 Mary Barclay went as she came ; she had been an unseen witness 
 of the happiness of these simple people, and she returned to town 
 strangely softened by her visit. 
 
 The men were all going down, and the chapels were over, and 
 the courts deserted, and Herbert was only waiting up for a remit- 
 tance from the little mother to take him down too. Spurway had 
 gone down days before. He had gone over to Herbert's rooms on 
 the last morning, and had begged him, if he were going down to 
 Bideford, to say nothing about that affair with Julie. 
 
 It was all over now, and he was heartily sorry for it. She had 
 led him on to it — it is always the woman's fault — or he should 
 never have got into such a scrape — she and Grinley. Grinley had 
 backed her up, and made him do a great many foolish things. He 
 would tell Herbert all about it some day ; meanwhile, he begged 
 him not to betray him, not to say anything about his folly to the 
 people at home. 
 
 Herbert promised. He was always getting himself mixed up 
 with other people's secrets. 
 
 On the Sunday morning he received the little mother's letter, 
 enclosing a post-office order for the amount of his fare down to 
 
 15—2 
 
228 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 Bideford. He was musing on that last quiet Sunday night, when 
 the hush of the vacation had already settled upon Cambridge, as 
 he passed through the Great Court, and out beneath the ancient 
 gate, on Mary Barclay's words, ' A Fellow of Trinity.' 
 
 His dreams had been wide enough, and soared high enough ; but 
 they had never embraced this possibility, and the words still rang 
 in his ears with a strange persistence. He had planned many 
 things ; among them, as the ulterior fruit of a good degree, the 
 head-mastership of the old Grammar School at Bideford. But a 
 Fellow of Trinity — this had not entered into his wildest dreams. 
 He looked up with quite a new feeling at the old gray buildings, 
 and the mullioned windows, that the sun was shining upon and 
 glorifying, of the comfortable Fellows' room. He realized, with a 
 sudden awed consciousness, the possibilities the future held for 
 him, when the dark curtain of uncertainty and poverty should be 
 lifted, and a gentle scholarly life should open out before him amid 
 all these dear and venerable surroundings. 
 
 There was a purblind old Fellow crossing the court now — a 
 grave, dignified, courtly old Fellow, a very distinguished scholar in 
 his time, but now a feeble old man — noble still to look upon, with 
 a fringe of white hair beneath his tasselled scholar's cap resting on 
 his rusty silk gown. Herbert had a sudden interest in him, and 
 stepped forward and helped him over the step of the postern, 
 He lifted his cap with a smile of pleased surprise as he passed 
 beneath the gate, and Herbert paused and looked after him. 
 
 How much had he gained, and how much had he missed, in this 
 lonely, peaceful life ! Herbert was still asking, this question as he 
 passed through Trinity Street, and across the market-place ; and a 
 mist rose before his eyes as he repeated softly to himself Mary 
 Barclay's words : ' A Fellow of Trinity !' 
 
 ' A— Fel— low— of— Trin— ity !' 
 
 The church-bells were ringing all over Cambridge for the evening 
 service, and they broke upon his ear with a sudden clash and a 
 clang ; and the ridiculous old bells of St. Edward's were shouting 
 after him across the market-place : 
 
 ' A— Fel— low— of— Trin— ity !' 
 
 There could be no mistake about it ; the magic syllables were 
 rising and falling regularly with the rhythmical beat of the bells : 
 
 ' A— Fel— low— of— Trin— ity !' 
 
 The foolish undergraduate blushed consciously, for he thought 
 everybody must hear it. Perhaps they did, but the bells had a 
 different voice for them. 
 
 They were telling a different story no doubt to every ear. To 
 some : 
 
 ' A— nice — fat — Bish-op-ric !' 
 
 'A — seat — on — the — "Wool-sack !' 
 
 And so on ad libitum, varying their tale for every listening ear. 
 They told a different tale to us when we were young. They will 
 
A MILLION OF MONEY. 229 
 
 tell a different story ■when we are gone, and our children will listen 
 eagerly to their sweet promises over again. 
 
 God bless them for their kindly voices if they make any of us 
 nobler and braver, and lift us up when we are weary and cast down ; 
 if they sound in disappointed lives to some brother forlorn and 
 shipwrecked, who, hearing them, will gird his armour on afresh, 
 and tremblingly take heart again ! 
 
 It was towards the close of a lovely blue June day that Herbert 
 went down to his old home at Bideford. The beauty of the day 
 and the loveliness of this new green, hilly "West-Country had been 
 growing upon him all the way, ever since he left the weary flats 
 and fenlands of Cambridge. As he looked out of the window of 
 the third-class railway carriage upon the dear familiar scenes, upon 
 all the loveliness that had surrounded him in his childhood, he 
 thought how little everything had changed. The rich abundant 
 summer foliage and wealth of blossom were on the trees and the 
 hedgerows, and the grass in the meadows, and the sweet summer 
 scents filled all the air, and they all with one accord and one voice 
 welcomed him back. 
 
 There was no change here in these kind dumb voices ; and the 
 old familiar elm-trees by the road whispered to him as he walked 
 up alone from the station, in the same low, hushed whisper that he 
 remembered in his childhood, and waved their arms aloft in the old 
 familiar way. The rooks were cawing in them now, and looking 
 out over the sides of the same old nests he had always remembered. 
 
 Under the sweet green elms he came up to the cottage. It was 
 no longer poor or mean in his eyes, for he saw things clearer now. 
 A woodbine draped the porch, and a climbing rose-tree grew all 
 over the front and peeped in at the windows ; and yellow stone- 
 worts were blossoming all over the thatch ; and from the little 
 green garden rose the delightful smell of the dear homely flowers 
 he had known and loved all his life. 
 
 No one had come to the station to meet him, for he had given no 
 notice of his coming. 
 
 But the little mother was awaiting him, and the best parlour was 
 prepared for him, and there were white curtains fluttering in the 
 window, and flowers on the table, and all his prize-books dusted 
 on the shelf, iooking at him like old friends. 
 
 The little mother was unchanged. She was lovelier than ever, 
 he thought, but more fragile. She was such a little creature when 
 he took her in his strong arms ! She wept to see him, but she hid 
 her tears bravely, and busied herself to prepare a more substantial 
 welcome for him. 
 
 When he went up to his own old little room beneath the 
 eaves, a mist came before his eyes as he humbly thanked God for 
 the tender love that was still spared him. Everything in the 
 familiar room was unchanged, but the carpet was more worn than 
 he remembered it beside his bed. It was not worn bv hU knees. 
 
230 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 There were guests staying at the great house across the Torridge, 
 and Herbert met them the next morning as he was strolling along 
 a country road revisiting the familiar haunts of his youth. He waa 
 strolling leisurely along through a sweet dusky lane, where the 
 branches met overhead, lingering over every familiar landmark, 
 when the sound of voices disturbed him, and, looking up, he saw 
 only a few paces from him, and advancing towards him, the figures 
 of two girls — Muriel Spurway and Lilian Howell. 
 
 The Trinity Lily, lovelier, fresher, and more lily-like than ever, 
 paused in her walk as if she would have stopped, and Herbert 
 raised his hat and stood aside for her to pass. Before she could 
 return his greeting or recover from her surprise, her companion 
 had drawn her hastily away, and left Herbert standing cold and 
 discomfited in the middle of the road. 
 
 What had he done he asked himself bitterly to merit this 
 rebuff ? 
 
 It could not be his poverty ; he knew Lilian Howell too well to 
 attribute for a moment such an unworthy motive. He remembered 
 all too well those earlier days after his accident, when he had told 
 her all about his poverty and the little mother, and how her eyes, 
 those clear gray eyes that looked at him now so coldly, had 
 brightened, and her cheek had flushed at the touching story of 
 Lucy's sacrifices for her boy. He recalled, too, the change that had 
 come over her, when the truthful eyes looked sorry and disappointed 
 in him. Their cold reproof had haunted him with a dull sense of 
 injustice, but now it cut him to the quick. 
 
 He asked himself a thousand times what he had done, in thak 
 miserable morning walk. He asked the same question again the next 
 day, when he met Lady Millicent and bluff Sir Hugh driving 
 through the town, and they ignored his bow, and cut him dead in 
 the face of all the lynx-eyed shopkeepers in High Street. 
 
 He blushed dreadfully. He could have cried with mortification. 
 He was hurt beyond measure. 
 
 What had he done ? 
 
 He hadn't any appetite at dinner, and fond, anxious Lucy pro- 
 posed the dinner-time should be altered, as he was unaccustomed to 
 these plebeian hours. 
 
 He never told her anything about the rebuffs he had received, the 
 mortification he had endured. She saw he was suffering, but she 
 never guessed the cause. Had he confided in this kind counsellor 
 what misery he might have been spared ! 
 
 What youths, indeed, do confide to their anxious parents the 
 stormy passions that consume them — when Phyllis is shy, or fickle 
 or cold, or turns up her little dainty nose, and looks the other way 
 when Strephon happens to meet her ? 
 
 The poor boy bore his mortification in silence. He walked in 
 uufrequented roads ; he avoided the woods and hills that lay 
 round Bratton. He wandered away, like he used to do years ago, 
 
A MILLION OF MONEY. 231 
 
 to the seashore, or roamed amid the sandy desolation of Northam. 
 He made himself as miserable as he could; but he never complained. 
 He could bear the coldness and discourtesy of the people at the 
 great house ; he was accustomed to receive the cold shoulder from 
 the landed gentry of Bidef ord ; they had never, at any time in his 
 life, shown him any cordiality or encouragement. But he could 
 not understand the changed manner of Lilian Howell, and he 
 chafed unreasonably under the injustice of it. Surely the Spurways, 
 whose guest she was, were influencing her, were prejudicing her 
 against him. She never looked his way now if he met her by any 
 chance in his walks. He bowed gravely when he met her, but he 
 never raised his eyes to hers after that first morning. 
 
 He met her riding with Spurway once, and, the road being 
 narrow, stood in the hedge, flattening himself among the brambles 
 while they passed ; but Spurway didn't see him either, or acknow- 
 ledge his salute, only bespattered him with mud from his horse's 
 heels, and, no doubt, liberally confounded the beggar's impudence. 
 
 There were a number of guests staying at the great house, and 
 lawn-tennis parties every day, and picnics, and boating, and golfing 
 on the links at Westward Ho ; but never an invitation came to 
 Herbert to join them. 
 
 He had not been home a week before he realized the divine truth 
 that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. He wasn't 
 exactly a prophet, but he had won already the highest distinction 
 that the University has to confer, and — and — he acknowledged this 
 with bated breath — he might be, by-and-by, a Fellow of Trinity ! 
 
 Nobody in Bidef ord gauged his success. His coat was shiny at 
 the seams, and his trousers uncommonly baggy at the knees. 
 They didn't understand that kind of success. 
 
 When Herbert had been ' down ' a fortnight, he had had quite 
 enough of it. He wrote to his tutor, and asked if his scholarship 
 would enable him to keep the summer term. 
 
 Mr. Routh wrote back, kindly and cordially, and offered to make 
 up any deficiency that it would not cover ; and, in addition, offered 
 to coach him throughout the term without any remuneration 
 whatever. 
 
 Herbert packed up bis shabby portmanteau, and kissed the little 
 mother, and went back to Cambridge the next day. As he had 
 hailed the dear familiar landmarks 'going down,' so he hailed them 
 coming up ; and when from the golden vapours of the July sunset 
 the spires and towers of Cambridge came solemnly out of the 
 summer night and its shadows to meet him, he felt indeed that the 
 promise of the bells, which struck upon his ears as he steamed into 
 tha Btation, was bringing about its own fulfilment. 
 
232 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 PISTOLS FOR TWO. 
 
 * The fault was mine ; the fault was muie T 
 
 Herbert worked hard during the long vacation. Work is a 
 specific for many things — for grief, disappointment, broken hearts. 
 Hard-working men never die of any of these diseases. 
 
 Herbert was not at all likely to die of any of them ; he was 
 much more likely to kill himself with his work. He charged at it 
 now more furiously than ever. It meant so many things to him — 
 at least, the possible results did. 
 
 Success, with its euphonious repetition of consonants, spelt so 
 many other things beside — things that his heart hungered for — 
 honour, distinction, fame, an assured position, relief from the 
 galling chain of poverty, and, maybe, love. 
 
 But it meant, above all, lifting the little mother out of her low 
 estate into the position she was so fitted to adorn ; it meant 
 repaying her, in one proud moment, for all the privations and 
 sacrifices she had so willingly endured through all these years. 
 
 He had settled in his mind that first night, as he lay tossing in 
 his bed in his narrow college chamber, looking out at the square 
 patch of blue sky visible above the Great Court, that there were 
 two principal things he had to work for — the little mother and the 
 love of Lilian Howell. 
 
 He had set this before himself long ago. It had been a pillar of 
 cloud by day, and of fire by night, through all his University career. 
 He could afford to wait ; he could afford to be misunderstood until 
 that goal was reached that he was panting for. He had only to 
 work — and 'wait a minute !' 
 
 At least, he told himself so ; and he did the first part of his self- 
 allotted task with a courage and determination that could have but 
 one result through the breathless, sultry summer days. 
 
 On the first day of the October term he saw Lilian Howell in her 
 tccustomed seat at chapel. He had not seen her since that memor- 
 able day at Bideford ; and, strangely enough, the sight of her 
 sitting there in her white gown brought back to him, across con- 
 fessions, and beliefs, and rhythmic Psalms, not the narrow Devon^ 
 shire lane, and the slight that had been put upon him, nor the mud 
 that had bespattered him — it brought back none of these disturbing 
 visions : it only brought before his eyes the face of the little 
 mother — a strange, sweet suggestiveness that ever after hung about 
 the pure presence of the Trinity Lily. 
 
 She never looked at him through all the service, though his eyes 
 
PISTOLS FOR TWO. 233 
 
 and his thoughts were always intent on her, and she avoided him 
 now, for the first time, in the quad. 
 
 Herbert understood the reason better when he read a letter from 
 the little mother that awaited him on his breakfast-table when he 
 came in from chapel. 
 
 It told him the latest piece of news at Bideford. The heir of 
 the great house was engaged to marry Lilian Howell. 
 
 Lilian Howell ! 
 
 A mist swam before his eyes, and for a moment familiar objects 
 were in unaccustomed places. He did not stay to think ; he did 
 not stay to throw off his surplice which he had worn at chapel, but 
 with his face a shade paler than the spotless linen (it had just 
 teturned from the college laundress), he strode across the court 
 with the open letter in his hand. 
 
 Jayne, who had come up to read for orders, and was wearing with 
 much humility his B.A. hood, tried to stop him at the foot of the 
 staircase ; but he brushed by him unheeding, with a face as stern 
 and inflexible as Fate. 
 
 He passed through the cloisters into Neville's Court and up an 
 unfamiliar staircase. He paused before a door over which was 
 inscribed in white letters the name of ' Spurway.' 
 
 He knocked at the door with a peremptory rap that was unusual 
 in Neville's Court. The door was opened by Spurway's scout, 
 and Spurway himself was sitting at breakfast with a party of 
 friends. They were strangers to Herbert, and they glanced up at 
 him superciliously, standing there in his surplice, with an open 
 letter in his hand, and his white, stricken face. 
 
 Spurway looked up nervously at his uninvited guest, and glanced 
 with a whitening face at the open letter in his hand. 
 
 He had no need to demand of his visitor, ' Oh, come ye in peace, 
 or come ye in war ?' He had no need to ask the messenger of 
 Fate who had broken in upon the feast and stood in their midst, 
 ' Unto which of all of us is thy message ?' 
 
 He tried to ask him to have some breakfast, but his voice 
 trembled in spite of himself. He did like the giver of the 
 interrupted feast of old : he excused himself to his guests and 
 cook Herbert into an inner room. 
 
 Herbert laid the open letter before him, pointing with an inflex- 
 ible finger to the terrible line. 
 
 ' Is this true ?' he inquired hoarsely. 
 
 1 1 don't know that I am bound to answer such an — an imperti- 
 nent question,' said Spurway loftily. 
 
 ' Tou will answer this,' Herbert said very quietly, but with a 
 strange fire blazing up in his eyes. 
 
 1 Well,' said the other with an assumption of indifference, ' it 
 must be known sooner or later. I don't know that it really matters. 
 It is quite true.' 
 
 ' And Julie ?' Herbert asked. 
 
234 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 His voice was so hoarse that he scarcely recognised it for his 
 own. 
 
 ' Oh, that is my business. That has nothing to do with your 
 question.' 
 
 ' It has everything to do with it !' said Herbert, speaking calmly 
 with a great effort. 
 
 'Oh, I forgot ; she was an old flame of yours, and you are 
 interested in the denouement. I have pensioned her off. She will 
 have a dot. If you are still smitten, I shall be happy to arrange 
 things satisfactorily. She shall have a very handsome dot." 1 
 
 Herbert didn't knock him down, and he didn't shoot him with 
 one of his own pistols which hung temptingly against the wall, 
 and he didn't throw him out of the window, which happened to be 
 open, into the middle of Neville's Court, though there were many 
 men in Trinity who would have justified all or any of these summary 
 proceedings. 
 
 He didn't relieve his feelings in any way, but his white face 
 flushed scarlet, and the smouldering devil in his eyes leapt into a 
 flame. 
 
 ' You shall give me satisfaction for this P said Herbert, in hia 
 most magnificent manner ; and he strode out of the room, and past 
 the assembled guests with his face aflame, and the little mother's 
 letter crumpled up in his hand. 
 
 When Spurway's guests, who had got a little impatient of the delay 
 — and the fish and the dainty meats had grown cold while he was 
 away — inquired of him the errand of this mad fellow, he cursed 
 ' the beggar's impudence ' in no measured terms, but he didn't tell 
 them his errand. 
 
 Herbert did a thing at Hall on that eventful day that he had 
 never done before in the course of his ^residence at Trinity — he 
 called for wine. 
 
 He chose a moment of comparative silence to make this unusual 
 request. 
 
 Generally there is so much conversation going on at Hall that 
 the evil brings its own remedy, and drowns itself in a universal 
 hum. To this succeeds at rare intervals a dead silence. It was in 
 one of these pauses that Herbert called in a stentorian voice for 
 'wine.' 
 
 Everybody looked round, and the waiter, whose business it was 
 to attend the scholars' table, paused in astonishment with a dish 
 in mid-air when he saw from whom the call proceeded. Jayne 
 looked up with a sudden terror in his face, and Cudworth paused 
 with a dainty morsel on his fork, and looked over to the scholars' 
 table. 
 
 The wine was brought — not a dainty trifle of a glass on a slender 
 stem, but a college bumper. 
 
 Herbert rose from the table with the glass in his hand, and 
 everyone looked up thinking he was going to propose a toast. The 
 
PISTOLS FOR TWO. 235 
 
 momentary lull was over, and the hum of many voices was as loud 
 as ever. 
 
 Herbert did not propose a toast ; his face was perfectly white 
 and unnaturally calm, and he walked quietly over to the gentle- 
 men commoners' table, where Spurway sat among his friends, and 
 coolly and deliberately threw the glass of wine across the dinner- 
 table in his face. 
 
 Had a mine exploded beneath their feet there could not have been 
 greater consternation than ensued at the table at which the gentle- 
 men commoners sat at meat. They rose to their feet to a man, 
 except, indeed, Spurway, who was streaming from every pore with 
 claret. The aim had been excellent, and every drop of the precious 
 liquid had taken effect. It was running out of his eyes ; it was 
 pouring from his hair ; it was dripping off the tip of his nose ; it 
 was oozing out of the corners of his mouth ; it was trickling from 
 his ears ; and the white bosom of his shirt and the collar of his 
 coat got the full benefit of the shower. 
 
 He looked up as soon as he could, panting and glaring like a 
 furious Bacchus at Herbert, who stood coolly on the other side of 
 the table with the empty glass still in his hand. 
 
 ' You threw this at me ?' he roared : no, he didn't exactly roar ; 
 he inquired, not meekly, but by no means loudly. 
 
 • Yes,' said Herbert quietly ; ' I threw it ; you all hear me V and 
 he looked round at the excited faces gathered round the board, 'and 
 you have your remedy. 
 
 He walked quietly back to his seat and placed the empty glass 
 upon the table, and, with his great stride and his lofty bearing, like 
 a prince in disguise, instead of a poor beggar of a scholar from a 
 country grammar school, he left the hall. 
 
 Jayne limped after him, and Cudworth realized the truth of the 
 old adage, ' There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip,' as the 
 dainty morsel on his halting fork never reached its destination. 
 
 Herbert sat and waited in his rooms after Hall for a message 
 from Spurway ; for a message that should come quickly — a message 
 that must come, surely. He waited in vain. 
 
 The white heat of his rage had cooled, and he could look at the 
 situation with calmer eyes. Of course he must fight now if Spur- 
 way challenged him. The days of duelling we all know are over, 
 but gentlemen have to settle their little differences. 
 
 Herbert did not say a word as to the cause of the quarrel to 
 either of his friends who sat and waited beside him through that 
 dreary October night. 
 
 When he was quite tired of waiting and speculating he went to 
 bed. He lay tossing through all that weary night with the face of 
 the little mother haunting him — such a pale, sad face, and the dear 
 eyes were full of reproaches. What business had he, he asked 
 himself, when Reason, with the gray morning light, came back to 
 her throne, to be fighting th?. battles of foolish little nursery 
 
236 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 governesses who will burn their wings in the first candle they come 
 to ? A pretty story it would be on Scandal's nimble tongue to go 
 back to Bideford, that he had constituted himself the champion of 
 Julie's wrongs — Julie, the little painted Jezebel, who had been 
 ordered out of Trinity and warned off the streets of Cambridge, and 
 stood in daily peril of the Spinning House. 
 
 He blushed between the sheets when he thought of his folly. 
 He remembered the cruel stories he had heard and read of hasty 
 words and foolish brawls overnight, and bloody meetings at dawn, 
 of lifelong remorse, and wasted lives, and hearths made desolate, 
 and innocent hearts broken. It was this last reflection moved him 
 more than all. What sorrow was he in his folly and madness about 
 to bring upon those he was bound to by the dearest ties ! 
 
 He got up directly it was light and wrote a letter to Harvard, 
 and begged him to come to him at once. His bedmaker's chronic 
 sniff was never more welcome than on this chill October morning, 
 and he lighted his own fire while she found a messenger to carry 
 the letter to Emmanuel without delay. 
 
 Jack Harvard was back before the messenger. He had come up 
 to read for another Tripos. 
 
 'When I've got a double-first I'll pack up my duds and look out 
 for an Al fast-sailing Mayflower] he explained when his friends 
 asked him why he had come up this term. 
 
 4 Well,' he said as he came bouncing into Herbert's room. He 
 had climbed the stairs two steps at a time, and the impetus thus 
 gained landed him against Herbert's door with a shock that might 
 attend the unexpected delivery of a sack of coals. 
 
 ' Well !' responded Herbert gloomily. 
 
 'So you've got yourself into a fix?' this was said admiringly 
 rather than disparagingly. 
 
 * Yes,' said Herbert, encouraged by the tone ; ' how did you hear 
 of it?' 
 
 ' Oh, everybody's heard of it ; it's all over Cambridge.' 
 
 This was not at all reassuring, neither was the unwonted gleam 
 of interest in the watery eyes of Herbert's bedmaker, who was 
 fidgeting about the room in a most provoking manner. Was she, 
 with a prevision of coming events, taking a last look at him, 
 and appraising the value of his wardrobe in the same watery 
 glance ? 
 
 Herbert despatched her to the college kitchen to fetch him some 
 fish, and shut his oak after her. 
 
 •Well, old man,' said Harvard, regarding him with manifest 
 approval as he lolled against the opposite wall ; 'so you spiled hia 
 linen. What's the weppins ?' 
 
 Herbert explained that at present there were no weapons in the 
 case. 
 
 ' Hasn't he sent to you yet ?' 
 
 Herbert shook his head gloomily. He was stirring that wretched 
 
PISTOLS FOR TWO. 237 
 
 fire that flatly refused to burn, and his back waa towards hia 
 friend. 
 
 4 By Jove ! where's the fellow's pluck ? You English are cool 
 ones ! If it had happened in the States, it would have been all 
 over before daylight, and one of you beggars would have had a 
 bullet through his heart.' 
 
 1 Yes,' said Herbert absently, and the scene rose between him and 
 the spluttering fire. The cold, gray morning and the two men — 
 who had been friends in youth — the measured paces, the deadly 
 weapons raised, the sudden flash, a white face on the grass, and a 
 conscience-stricken man kneeling beside it, and wildly striving to 
 stem the fast-ebbing tide, to call back the fleeting breath — a lifelong 
 remorse — a ruined life ! 
 
 It all passed before him in a moment, as the flame suddenly shot 
 up the chimney and the wood crackled fiercely and went out. 
 
 1 You don't think he'll take any step in the matter ?' Harvard 
 said presently. 
 
 ' I don't think he can help it. He must, I think, or go down. 
 Everybody would cut him.' 
 
 1 Won't he appeal to the Dean ?' 
 
 ' No,' said Herbert quietly ; ' I don't think he'll do that.' 
 ' Nor his tutor ?' 
 
 'No ; he has his own reasoni for not making a fuss about it,' 
 'Oh, I see. I don't want you to tell me more than you care to 
 about the provocation you had received before taking — er — such an 
 extreme measure ; but I beg your pardon if I am wrong : I presume 
 there is a woman in it ?' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert quietly, ' there's a lady in it.' 
 He was thinking of Lilian Howell. He had forgotten all about 
 Julie and her wrongs. 
 
 Harvard gave a prolonged whistle, and looked keenly at Herbert, 
 who blushed guiltily. 
 
 ' Just as I expected,' he said laconically ; ' there is always a 
 woman in it ! He has cut you out, I presume. I beg your pardon 
 again if I am wrong.' 
 
 Herbert blushed redder than ever. This cruel thrust of 
 Harvard's, keen as a two-edged sword, revealed to him what he 
 had never suspected until now, the real provocation of his most un- 
 warrantable act. He groaned aloud, and covered his face with his 
 hands. 
 
 Lilian Howell had a perfect right to choose between them, and 
 she had chosen Spurway. What woman in her senses wouldn't ? 
 
 The chapel bell was clanging out its last invitation, and the men 
 were flying across the quad. Harvard looked across the table to 
 him. 
 
 ' Suppose you go to chapel,' he said ; ' and I will stay here, and 
 think it out.' 
 Herbert got into his surplice as he was flying across the court, 
 
238 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 and the bell stopped, and he only got into the chapel in time by the 
 skin of his teeth. 
 
 Everybody looked up as he passed to his seat among the third- 
 year men, and his highlows made a dreadful clatter on the marble 
 floor. 
 
 The Dean's voice was reading the General Confession when 
 Herbert recovered himself sufficiently to listen to anything. It 
 seemed to him, in his highly-strung condition, that he had never 
 heard it before. In whatever limited sense a Dean may, by way 
 of example, regard himself as a miserable sinner, Herbert never felt 
 more like one in his life than when he fell down upon his knees on 
 the hard floor and confessed the murder there was in his heart. 
 
 It all came before him again, as he knelt there with the brand of 
 Cain already upon his brow. The vision that Harvard's words had 
 conjured up, and scenes in his own past life, rose before him like 
 pictures in a moving kaleidoscope. He was a boy again in the 
 grounds of Bratton, and Spurway and he were playing together ; 
 he was back again in his old schoolroom, and the faces of his old 
 schoolfellows were piled one above the other in a moving mass, and 
 his own name was being shouted by a hundred voices that he knew 
 so well, and he saw the bluff, kind face of old Sir Hugh beam upon 
 him as he shook him by the hand in his hearty way, and congratu- 
 lated him on his success ; and as he moved down the hall, amid 
 that sea of well-remembered faces, and the flutter of a white hand- 
 kerchief in the corner, that he knew instinctively belonged to the 
 little mother, Spurway's sister put out her cordial hand, and gave 
 him a red rose — how he blushed at the memory of it ! — and Ladv 
 Millicent extended two dainty fingers. She need not have given 
 him any. 
 
 And now, in return for all this confidence^ upon all these happy 
 
 memories, he was about to — to He didn't finish the sentence, 
 
 for the Confession was over, and the Absolution too, and he was 
 standing up, white-robed, and penitent, and singing the Psalm for 
 the day : ' Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle, or who shall 
 rest upon Thy holy hill ?' 
 
 In this calm light the rash act of over-night was no longer heroic. 
 It was a selfish and headstrong piece of folly. He only glanced 
 over once to where the Trinity Lily sat ; he dared not meet those 
 clear gray eyes. He did not see her face even then across the 
 gloom of the chapel. He saw instead the face of the little mother. 
 
 When the service was over, and he got back to his rooms, 
 Harvard was still there, but the fire was quite out. 
 
 A letter addressed to him in Spurway's hand was on the table. 
 He flushed all over when he saw it, but he didn't take it up. 
 
 'It came directly you went out,' said Harvard, nodding over 
 to it. 
 
 Herbert sat down in his accustomed "Windsor chair before the 
 »heerless hearth, but he didn't attempt to take up the letter. 
 
PISTOLS FOR TWO. 239 
 
 1 Why don't you open it ?' said Harvard impatiently. 
 
 1 It's all over,' said Herbert quietly ; ' I'm not going to fight P 
 
 ' Not fight ! What are you going to do, then ?' exclaimed 
 Harvard. 
 
 1 I'm going to apologize,' Herbert answered very quietly. ' I'm 
 going to apologize publicly. The insult was public, and the apology 
 must be public' 
 
 • Old man,' said Harvard, rising from his seat and coming over to 
 Herbert with his great hand outstretched, and his blue eyes glisten- 
 ing, ' you're a brick ! I'm proud to call you my friend !' 
 
 Herbert took his hand and pressed it silently. A woman 
 wouldn't have cared for such a pressure, especially if she wore 
 rings. Herbert didn't wear rings ; he hadn't one, indeed, to wear, 
 and he looked up with a look of grateful relief into Harvard's 
 face. 
 
 ' You think I'm doing right ?' he said humbly. 
 
 ' I don't think anything about it. You could do no other as — 
 as a Christian. It would have been — well, different — when your 
 blood was up ; but to meet a fellow now, after all this time, and 
 shoot him in cold blood — it would have been nothing short of 
 murder. Some men might call it honour ; I should call it deliberate 
 murder.' 
 
 Herbert went to his writing-table ; he was trembling all over, 
 and his hand shook so he could hardly hold the pen. Nothing had 
 ever affected him so in his life. He wrote a very contrite letter, 
 couched in the humblest terms, with a manly confession of his 
 fault, and offering the amplest public apology. 
 
 After he had finished this courageous epistle, he had the further 
 courage to show it to Harvard, who read it through without a 
 word ; but there was an unusual mist before his eyes as he laid it 
 down on Herbert's desk. 
 
 ' If you've no objection,' he said, ' I'll deliver that letter myself. 
 I've never been any man's second yet, but I'm proud to be 
 yours.' 
 
 Herbert folded up the paper, enclosing with it Spurway's letter, 
 with the seal unbroken. Whatever its contents might be he never 
 knew ; he never wished to know. He had only just discovered 
 that the truest honour was a manly confession of wrong — that the 
 truest courage was to refuse the meeting he had so recklessly 
 sought. 
 
 Harvard did not return, and Herbert sat alone at his miserable 
 breakfast-table. The fire was quite out, and he had a strange 
 reluctance to relight it. He had not sat there half an hour, it 
 seemed to him, but really a few minutes, before the door opened, 
 and Spurway came in. 
 
 He had not heard him knock, and he did not look up until he was 
 standing opposite to him by the desolate hearth. 
 
 His face was white and grave, and in the sober morning light it 
 
240 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 looked manly and handsome. He held out his hand to Herbert 
 there was a diamond ring on his finger, and gold links to hii 
 spotless cuffs, and his hands "were shapely and white. 
 
 ' Forgive me, Flowers,' he said, with a catch in his voice. ' I am 
 in the wrong, not you ; you served me right !' 
 
 Herbert could not believe his ears. 
 
 ' No,' he said gloomily, ' the fault was mine. I am very sorry. 
 I am willing to make a public apology, if — if you can forgive me.' 
 
 ' I have nothing to forgive,' said the other, with a tremor about 
 his full underlip that Herbert had never seen before. ' I deserved 
 all I got. I forgot you were a gentleman ; Flowers, I behaved 
 shamefully. I am very sorry ; will you forgive me ?' and again he 
 held out his hand. 
 
 ' Do you mean it ?' said Herbert huskily. 
 
 ' Of course I mean it, if — if yon are not too proud to take it.' 
 
 Herbert hadn't at all a fair hand, and it was stained with ink, and 
 he had no ring on his finger, and no cuff on his wrist, but he 
 Reached out the warm, manly hand of forgiveness and friendship 
 across the desolate hearth, and Tom Spurway shook it heartily. 
 
 ' I say, Flowers, you know,' he said awkwardly, ' there isn't any 
 need of an apology now — not the least. I only got what I deserved, 
 and I'm not ashamed to own it. Let it drop !' 
 
 But Herbert did not let it drop. That night after Hall, taking 
 advantage of a momentary lull, he rose from his seat and crossed to 
 where Spurway was sitting. Spurway knew what was coming, and 
 he rose from his seat, and waved him back. But Herbert was not 
 so easily silenced. Standing where he stood the previous night, 
 and looking round upon the upturned faces of the men of his own 
 standing, he said quietly, but in a loud voice that all at the table 
 might hear : 
 
 ' I did a most cowardly and unwarrantable act last night, un- 
 worthy of a member of this University ; and I desire now to offer 
 a most humble apology for it, not only to Mr. Spurway, but to all 
 the members of the University who sit at this table with him.' 
 
 There was a general murmur of applause, and Spurway, with hig 
 ^yes shining as he looked round upon his friends, exclaimed in an 
 agitated voice : 
 
 ' No, no, no ; the fault was mine ! Do you all hear ? The fault 
 Jfas mine. Gad, he served me nght I' 
 
A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 241 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 
 
 * Loaf, as I have loafed aforetime, through the streets with tranquil mind, 
 And a long-backed faucy mongrel trailing casually behind.' 
 
 There was nothing more said about it. Both men had acted 
 honourably ; and by common consent the subject was never again 
 referred to publicly. 
 
 Herbert's boots were quite as coarse as ever, and his coat was a 
 trifle more frayed ; but Spurway walked the whole length of 
 King's Parade with his arm in his, on the first fine sunshiny after- 
 noon after this event. 
 
 Their afternoon walk did not end with King's Parade, bat con- 
 tinued through the whole length of Trumpington Street, and 
 through the villages of Trumpington and Grantchester, or what is 
 familiarly known as the Grantchester Grind. 
 
 It is a grind peculiarly favourable to conversation ; the land- 
 scape offers few distractions to a poetic temperament. On this 
 particular grind, and in this and other walks, Spurway confided to 
 Herbert the story of his miserable entanglement with his mother's 
 protegee. 
 
 It was a very old story — a story ever told anew with shame and 
 humiliation. Of course the woman was in the wrong. 
 
 She had led him on ; and — and he had promised to marry her. 
 He had confided his embarrassment to Grinley, who at that time 
 was his friend and Mentor, and he had obligingly found a man 
 who was willing to play the part of parson. Julie — innocent, con- 
 fiding Julie — had followed him to Cambridge, and there, in Grinley's 
 rooms, with the aid of a college surplice and a B. A. hood, the sham 
 marriage had taken place. 
 
 It was not the first time such things had happened in Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 'And she never asked about the license ?' asked Herbert moodily, 
 dropping Spurway's arm, and placing the width of the footpath 
 between them. 
 
 ' Oh no ; she was quite satisfied.' 
 
 Quite satisfied ! Poor, credulous, simple Julie ! 
 
 After this confession Herbert found it necessary to devote him- 
 self more closely than ever to his work. He sported his oak through 
 all the bright winter afternoons, and took his solitary grind in the 
 damp misty mornings before Spurway was out of bed. 
 
 Of Julie he saw nothing during the remainder of the term. The 
 dog-cart, the bull-dog, and the tiger were seen no longer in the 
 streets of Cambridge. Spurway had told him incidentally that he 
 
 lfi 
 
242 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 had quite severed all connection with her, and allowed her, through 
 a mutual friend — he didn't say who, but Herbert gathered that 
 Mr. Grinley occupied that disinterested position — a certain sum, 
 conditional on her not appearing at Cambridge. 
 
 She had observed the condition so far, and her bright eyes, and 
 her ravishing toilets, and her tinted complexion and bewildering 
 fringe, were seen no more in the haunts of (University) men. 
 
 But in all these uninvited confidences there had been no mention 
 of Lilian Howell. Herbert dared not trust himself to speak of her, 
 and after that first admission Spurway's lips were sealed. Some 
 day, Herbert told himself, some day before it was too late, he would 
 urge upon him, by everything he held sacred, to make a free and 
 full confession of his guilt to the trusting girl who was about to be 
 his wife — to tell her all, make a clean breast of it, and throw him- 
 self upon her generosity. She must know it some day ; better 
 hear it from his lips than from strangers. 
 
 But Herbert had not spoken yet. He watched, with dreary eyes 
 and bitter, unreasoning impatience, the happy accepted suitor, in the 
 latest productions of a Bond Street tailor, make his afternoon calls 
 at the Lodge. He had a fine view of the entrance from his window, 
 and he knew to a minute how long he stayed ; and he followed him 
 in imagination through the oak-panelled hall, and up the wide 
 staircase, with the old divines looking gravely down upon him, into 
 
 the stately drawing-room, and — and Here his imagination 
 
 failed him, and he turned from the contemplation of his rival's bliss 
 with a groan. 
 
 He would usually relapse into blank verse, and other convenient 
 mediums of poetic expression, after noting these visits of Spurway 
 to the Lodge. He improved the occasions. His wounded feelings 
 found a balm in Latin hexameters. His sentiments at this period 
 of his University career, indeed, were quite a mine of wealth to him. 
 He turned them in different metres into various languages with 
 great comfort and satisfaction. 
 
 His emotions were a perennial spring, from which he filtered out 
 elegant Latin verses and the most graceful Greek odes that had been 
 written in Trinity for several decades. 
 
 He sometimes met Lilian Howell in the grounds leading about 
 the old Master — a sad, broken-down old man, whose life had been 
 desolated by his bereavement. He was always glad to see Herbert. 
 He reminded him of her he had lost, and he could talk to him 
 about his sorrow, and be sure of a quick and ready sympathy. 
 
 Lilian Howell would greet him coldly on these occasions ; she 
 never by any chance gave him her hand, and would seize an early 
 opportunity to slip away and leave him alone with the old Master. 
 
 Once Herbert met her walking with Spurway in the lime-tree 
 avenue ; it was not long after the episode related in the last 
 chapter. The heat of Spurway's new-born contrition had not had 
 time to cool, and he stopped and spoke to Herbert, and, turning to 
 
A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 243 
 
 his companion, with a faltering lip he said, awkwardly enough, and 
 with a sudden terror in his eyes : 
 
 ' I — I think you know Mr. Flowers, Lilian ?' 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered coldly, and with adverted eyes ; ' I have met 
 Mr. Flowers before.' 
 
 She bowed gravely and passed on, and left Herbert standing in 
 the path beneath the limes, and the rooks cawing mockingly over- 
 head. 
 
 ' He need not have been afraid that I should betray him,' said 
 Herbert bitterly as he took the opposite path ; ' he could surely 
 trust me. But, oh, what have I done, that she should look so 
 coldly ?' 
 
 It was not mere indifference ; he could have borne that. It was 
 rebuke — hard, stony rebuke and disapproval, he read in her clear 
 gray eyes. They had not always looked so. He remembered the 
 time when they were soft and yielding, and drooped before his 
 
 ardent gaze as if Ah, that was all over now, and they had long 
 
 since ceased to droop ! 
 
 About this time he received a letter from Mary Barclay, asking 
 him to come and see her. He went. He had nothing much to do 
 just then, and he yearned for female sympathy. He wasn't a bit 
 afraid now of the magnificent Jeames who aired his fine figure and 
 his gorgeous livery against the pillars of Mary Barclay's town resi- 
 dence. He did not look the seedy undergraduate over in his ac- 
 customed supercilious manner, but he ushered him at once into the 
 tessellated hall, and handed him over to the attendants there. 
 
 The flunkeys all knew him again, perhaps because frayed waist- 
 coats and shiny coats were rare in Belgravia, and the ring of his 
 highlows ou the marble floor was a thing to be remembered. 
 
 A footman preceded him up the wide staircase, which his feet 
 had never yet trod, and ushered him into the great drawing-room. 
 His heart did not beat a bit fast as he passed up the grand stair- 
 case, with the family portraits of the Barclays looking down upon 
 him. He had seen quite as good pictures at the Fitzwilliam 
 Museum at Cambridge, and staircase, too, for the matter of that, to 
 say nothing of the ceiling, which one must dislocate one's neck to 
 look at. These things were quite indifferent to him now, and 
 didn't even impress him as they did the first time. 
 
 Mary Barclay was at the further end of the long drawing-room, 
 and in the gloom of the winter day, and the glory and grandeur of 
 the apartment, he did not see her when he first entered. The 
 carpet was so soft that his highlows were unheard as he walked 
 gravely through the room, looking round with a mild interest upon 
 this unwonted exhibition of wealth. The walls and the curtains 
 and the furniture of the room were covered with white satin, 
 delicately embroidered in soft, low tints. There were pictures by 
 Boucher and Watteau and Lancret on the walls, and objets d'ari 
 scattered in profusion all over the room. On the mantelpiece waa 
 
 16—2 
 
244 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 a suite of priceless old Sevres vases, and in the centre a clock, the 
 enamelled dial like a belt encircling the globe of old pdte teiidre. 
 While Herbert was glancing at it and mentally comparing it with a 
 very honest timekeeper of abnormal size, that had once belonged to 
 the old coach, and now reposed in his waistcoat-pocket, Mary 
 Barclay came forward from a window where she had been writing. 
 
 She greeted him very kindly, and made him sit down on one of 
 the magnificent satin-covered couches, which he did with much 
 inward trepidation as to the result, and ruefully contemplated his 
 muddy boots on the delicate Aubusson carpet. He didn't contem- 
 plate them long. Before he had been five minutes in the stately 
 room, he had forgotten that his coat was shiny, that his linen was 
 frayed, that he was an inpecunious undergraduate, and that the 
 grandeur around him was anything at all unusual. 
 
 Mary Barclay set him completely at his ease, and he was as much 
 at home with her there as he had been in the little sitting-room at 
 the Bull Hotel. 
 
 She congratulated him on his last escapade ; she had heard all 
 about it, and her beautiful eyes grew moist as she praised his 
 courage in acting as he had done. 
 
 ' It was very noble ; it was very manly of you to apologize,' she 
 said with rising colour ; and her lips trembled as she spoke. ' It 
 was true courage. Forgive my asking you, for I am sure you had 
 just provocation for your act, but — but — was there a woman in 
 it?' 
 
 Her lovely face was covered with blushes as she asked this 
 question, and her eyes fell before Herbert's. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said quietly, ' there was a woman in it. There always 
 is, I am told, in such quarrels ; but I had no right to constitute 
 myself her champion. She was nothing to me, and I was to 
 blame.' 
 
 Mary Barclay's eyes were flashing, and her cheeks were crimson 
 and her bosom was heaving ; she was so easily moved by any noble 
 thing. 
 
 ' It was all the more chivalrous of you,' she said softly. ' I don't 
 think the men of old ever considered whether they had the right 
 or not. They were self -constituted avengers of wrong and oppres- 
 sion, and they always espoused the cause of the weak. I have no 
 one to espouse my quarrels now,' she said sadly. ' I have no loyal 
 knight and true ; would you be my champion, Mr. Flowers, if the 
 
 time should come ' She stopped suddenly and looked with 
 
 absent eyes into the wide fireplace, where a log-fire was burning on 
 the hearth. 
 
 Herbert smiled sadly ; he was thinking of a time when he had 
 pleaded for her to Geraint, when he had implored him to be true 
 to her and to himself ; and then he remembered Brown and what 
 he had done, and the lies that he had lied that she should be spared 
 the cruel knowledge of her lover's unfaithfulness. 
 
A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 245 
 
 4 You have a champion already,' he said, ' as true a knight as any 
 damsel of old ever had, in Mr. Brown.' 
 
 1 Mr. Brown !' she repeated impatiently. 
 
 She was looking at Herbert with her softening eyes, and she 
 wasn't thinking of Brown. 
 
 ' Brown is the best and trnest fellow in the world,' said Herbert 
 awkwardly ; ' and he has reason, whether he knows it or not, to 
 be deeply grateful to you. But he would always be your true, 
 loyal knight for Geraint's sake.' 
 
 ' And you ?' she said softly ; • you are more like him than 
 anyone I have met. You are under no obligation to me, you are so 
 independent ; you will take nothing at my hands ;' and she glanced 
 wearily round at the splendid room and sighed. ' Will you be mj 
 champion if I need one ? Will you fight my battles on some noblei 
 field ? You will be a great man some day. Mr. Flowers ; you will 
 succeed in what the world calls success ; a wider field of usefulness, of 
 honour, maybe, than you have ever dreamed of will open before 
 you. In this, when the time comes, will you put aside, as unworthy 
 in comparison, considerations of personal ease and advantage, and 
 espouse the cause of the weak ? Will you fight my battles for me 
 against injustice and oppression, and cruelty and wrong ? I am 
 only a woman, Mr. Flowers, but I am a steward of so many talents. 
 He would have helped me to use them aright. He would have 
 used his talents and my wealth for wise and noble ends. NoW I am 
 alone, my true, chivalrous knight is dead, and all my hopes and 
 aims are withered in the bud.' 
 
 She fell into a sudden passion of weeping, like, he remembered, 
 on that sad February day, when they led her away from Geraint's 
 grave. What could he say to comfort her ? 
 
 Herbert laid his hand involuntarily on hers, such a white, 
 shapely hand, gleaming with rings. 
 
 ' I hope,' he said gently, bending over her with a strange flutter 
 at his heart — 'I hope that no personal consideration will ever 
 prevent my being the champion of the weak, and if you can find no 
 worthier knight to fight your battles, Miss Barclay, you can 
 always count upon me.' 
 
 What had he said ? What had he done ? He flushed up to the 
 roots of his hair directly he had spoken the words, and he would 
 have drawn his hand away ; but Mary Barclay held it in hers, in a 
 clasp that made all his pulses leap. And yet he was not thinking 
 of her ; he was thinking of the bare room at Bideford, and the 
 small fire there would be, he knew so well, in that cheerless grate 
 over which the little Chelsea boy he had wept over in his childhood 
 kept watch and ward. 
 
 The Chelsea china figures in the cabinets in the rooms below 
 seemed all familiar to him, like the faces of old friends, as he passed 
 ;hcm walking by Mary Barclay's side to the dining-room beyond. 
 The portraits on the walls, the objects that had awed him on his 
 
2^6 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 first visit, had. all settled down into their places as being friendly 
 and familiar, and impressed him with another sensation that he 
 could not account for or understand. 
 
 The gold plate on the sideboard, the great silver epergne, the 
 silver dishes, the gloomy grandeur of the noble dining-room, did 
 not affect him at all. He was quite used to it. He might have 
 lived in a palace all his life for the interest he took in it. Once 
 during the meal he found himself looking at the monogram on the 
 fork he was using, and, catching himself in the act, blushed guiltily 
 and laid it down. 
 
 He promised to come again soon, very soon. There were so 
 many schemes that Mary Barclay wanted to consult him upon, and 
 they would be abortive without his aid. 
 
 Ha smiled when she said this, and looked down into her eager 
 face. 
 
 ' I know what you are thinking of,' she said impetuously. ' You 
 are thinking of your Tripos. You must not let me, you must not 
 let anything, interfere with that. And when that is over, 
 then ' 
 
 She did not finish the sentenoe, but she sighed and pressed his 
 hand ; and her own carriage was waiting at the door to drive him 
 to the station. 
 
 He took the little Chelsea boy up when he got back to his rooms 
 at Trinity, and looked at it with an unwonted interest. It repre- 
 sented many things to him — prospective things, things that his 
 soul hungered for, and he put it down with a sigh, and turned 
 to the contemplation of some too familiar-looking letters that his 
 duns had left during his absence. 
 
 ' There has been a feller a-waitin' about the staircase, sir,' said 
 his bed maker before she left for the night. ' He's a-bin hangin' 
 about here 'most all the day. He wouldn't believe you weren't in till 
 I opened the door an' let him see for hisself. He's about no good, 
 sir, depend upon it. I should keep the door a-sported if I were 
 you.' 
 
 This lean, meagre, fawning old Ruth had been a faithful friend 
 to Herbert in her humble way during the years he had been at 
 Trinity. She had been bedmaker to that staircase so long that it 
 had become, as it were, her personal property. She took an 
 interest, too, a quite personal interest, in the men who came and 
 went during her long reign. She was quite as proud if her ' gentle- 
 men got through ' as the men themselves, and lorded it over the 
 heads of other bedmakers if they happened to take higher places in 
 the lists than their ' gentlemen.' 
 
 She had long ago scented Herbert's poverty, but he had so won 
 her soft old heart from the first by his simple, kindly manner that 
 jhe treated him with the same consideration as if he had been a 
 lord, and — what was more to the point — respected his humble stores 
 of groceries and potted meats and college commons. He had no 
 
A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 247 
 
 need to keep a key turned on anything, indeed, except his letters, 
 and those she did read, and knew all about the little mother and 
 the small household at Bideford. 
 
 A strange thing did happen more than once, that puzzled Herbert 
 when he thought at all about it. His tea-caddy not unfrequently 
 ran dry over-night, and, lo ! in the morning some beneficent fairy 
 had come in, without tapping at his oak, and replenished it. The 
 same miracles happened with other daily necessaries. No big 
 bundles of grocery dropped exactly from the ceibing, done up 
 neatly in brown paper, and tied with blue and white twine, or were 
 left on the staircase outside the door, like Goldsmith's memorable 
 boots, but like the widow's cruse, Herbert's tea-caddy, when it was 
 at its lowest ebb, had a way of holding out. 
 
 The beneficent fairy crossed the Great Court after giving Herbert 
 this piece of advice. She had a habit of cringing which made her 
 stoop, and she wore a frouzy shawl, and she habitually carried a 
 basket beneath it which contained the harvest she had gleaned 
 during the day. 
 
 Boaz was free-handed and careless and rich, and his presses 
 were brimming over and his garners overflowing ; and this lean, 
 hungry old Ruth had a bed-ridden husband and a crippled child 
 dependent on her gleanings. 
 
 She never looked about her very much as she hobbled through 
 the courts of Trinity, but the figure of a man that passed by the 
 gate as she went out seemed familiar to her, and she turned and 
 looked after him. 
 
 ' Now, I wonder whether he's a-sported his oak ?' she murmured. 
 1 1 11 be bound he hasn't, after all my warnin' of him !' 
 
 Ruth was quite right. Herbert hadn't taken the precaution to 
 sport his oak. 
 
 The man turned in at his staircase as if he knew it, and paused 
 at his door. He did not need to shout ' Come in !' for the man 
 followed the knock directly, and came across the room to where 
 Herbert was sitting. 
 
 ' Mr. Flowers ?' he said in a most unpleasant voice. 
 
 Herbert looked up, and nodded an unwilling assent . 
 
 Why hadn't he shut his oak ? 
 
 The man laid an unsavoury-looking bit of yellow paper down 
 before him, and Herbert, who had seen something of the kind 
 before in Brown's possession, felt himself getting extremely 
 uncomfortable, with a creepy - crawly sensation down his 
 spine. 
 
 ' What is this ?' he asked, touching it delicately, as if it were red- 
 hot. 
 
 4 A county court summons, sir. You are summoned at the suit 
 of Messrs. Blazer and Co., tailors.' 
 
 ' What is to be done ?' 
 
 1 Why, pay it, sir, of course,' said the man with a grin. 
 
248 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 1 But if I can't, if I haven't got the money,' said Herbert 
 desperately, ' what is to be done ?' 
 
 ' 'Spect you'll have to raise it, sir,' said the man, looking round 
 with the eye of a connoisseur at Herbert's poor furniture ; 
 ' gents always do. Anyhow, it's got to be paid.' 
 
 ' Got to be paid.' Herbert kept repeating the words to himself 
 through all that dreary night. They mixed themselves up with his 
 dreams, and were repeated by different voices. Sometimes it was 
 the little mother, sometimes it was Lilian Howell, and she always 
 said it reproachfully, and with such reproofs in her sweet eyes that 
 he could not bear to meet them. Sometimes it was Mary Barclay 
 who was repeating them, and he could see her smiling, as she 
 smiled up into his face when she asked him if he would fight her 
 battles, and she held the yellow paper in one hand and a long 
 netted purse in the other ; it was so heavily weighted he could not 
 lift it, and he could see the gleam of the yellow gold through the 
 silken mesh. 
 
 While he was still trying to raise it from the ground he awoke. 
 The silken purse had melted away, but the yellow paper was there, 
 on his dressing-table, where he had put it over-night, lest his bed- 
 maker should see it. As if he could hide anything from he* 
 eyes ! 
 
 There were more pressing letters awaiting him on his breakfast- 
 table, and a couple of duns outside his door, when he came in after 
 lecture. He looked round his room, like the man had looked over 
 night, for some available property to turn into ready money. There 
 was nothing but the old coach's silver inkstand, that had been in 
 jeopardy so often, but it had never been in greater jeopardy than 
 now. He took it up affectionately and read the inscription. 
 
 All the dear memories that had been associated with this one 
 relic of the gentle scholar rose before him, and he put it down with 
 a sigh. While he was looking at it his bedmaker had come in to 
 lay the cloth for his luncheon. He put it down hurriedly in some 
 confusion, but she had caught him in the act, and drawn her own 
 conclusions. With all his vigilance, he had gone out that morning 
 and left the paper he was so anxious for her not to see, fluttering 
 its yellow pages in the draught from his ill-fitting window, on his 
 dressing-table. 
 
 She could put two and two together as well as most people. 
 She had had occasion to in her hard life. She smoothed out her 
 apron and came over to him, when he was standing by his writing- 
 table, and with a dusky red creeping up into her homely face 
 beneath the wrinkles, she dropped him a sort of curtsey. 
 
 ' If I may make so bold, sir,' she said humbly, as if she were 
 about to ask a favour, ' I wouldn't do that if I was you. If you 
 happen to be in any difficulty, sir, why don't you go to your tutor ? 
 Mr. Routh, sir, is as nice-spoken and as reasonable a gentleman as 
 there is in the college, an' he'll help you out of it. You might do 
 
A BENEFICENT FAIRY. 249 
 
 worse 'n take an old 'woman's advice, sir ; for I've seen the same 
 thing agoing on here over and over again ; an' I've seen them that's 
 been rained, and them that's broke the hearts of the people belongin' 
 to 'em. Oh, the scenes that I've a witnessed on this staircase ; an' 
 the best-natured young gentlemen in the world a-brought to the 
 dogs, and all through not goin' to their tutor in time !' 
 
 Herbert did what no undergraduate with any personal dignity 
 would have done — he took his bedmaker's advice. 
 
 Mr. Routh received him with his habitual chilling severity of 
 manner. He was really a delightful man ; but he had spent his 
 lifetime in lonely study and self-companionship, and had acquired 
 a hard, dry, unsympathetic way that did not encourage confidence. 
 
 Herbert found him sitting by his lonely hearth, in his great, 
 gloomy, panelled room, in the dusky gloom of the December 
 afternoon. 
 
 He didn't exactly know how to begin, so he spread the county 
 court summons open before him, and asked him, very humbly, if 
 he would advise him what to do about it. 
 
 Mr. Routh had seen documents of that particular nature and 
 hue before, and the embarrassment was by no means a new one to 
 him in his capacity as college tutor. 
 
 'And is this all you owe in Cambridge, Mr. Flowers ?' he asked, 
 looking at Herbert with his searching gray eyes. 
 
 Herbert poured out his dismal confession. His University debts 
 were not large, but they were numerous, and most of them had been 
 contracted in his freshman's year. 
 
 ' Why not tell your mother ?' he said ; ' surely she will pay them ? 
 It does not seem to me that you have been extravagant, by any 
 means ; these are all for necessaries.' 
 
 • Oh, sir, she would if she could — she would if she knew it ; but 
 — but she would starve herself to pay them !' 
 
 And then, with his eyes shining and a pink spot on either of his 
 cheeks, Herbert told the tutor what sacrifices Lucy had already 
 made for him. 
 
 ' I have no right here, sir,' he said bitterly. ' I am out of place 
 here among rich men, and compelled to live above my means. I 
 ought never to have come here ;' and he buried his face in his 
 hands. 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' said Mr. Routh kindly, and he put his hand on 
 Herbert's shoulder, ' you are in your right place, and this very 
 discipline of poverty that you are so impatient of is — you will 
 acknowledge it by-and-by — the finest discipline in the world. All 
 the men, and they are the greatest, whose memories are preserved 
 in this place, have acknowledged it before you. The very effort of 
 self-control involved in this daily, hourly denial of everything that 
 is surperfluous gives both a test of real superiority of character, 
 and leads to the highest and most enduring results in the way of 
 
250 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 self -discipline. This University is not only a seat of culture, but a 
 school of life, where experience is gained and character strengthened ; 
 where men learn, not only how to deal with their fellow-men, but, 
 in the great battle of life, how to bear themselves like men.' 
 
 Herbert looked up with a film before his eyes, and the muscles 
 about his lips working. 
 
 ' Thank yon, sir,' he said simply ; ' if — if I can tide over this 
 difficulty, I will never, please God, get into such a strait again. 
 What I cannot pay for I will never have.' 
 
 Mr. Routh jotted down, with a very worn bit of blacklead pencil 
 on the back of an envelope, the amount of Herbert's debts. It 
 was ridiculously small, and he smiled as he handed the paper to 
 Herbert. 
 
 ' Is this all ?' he asked. Herbert could remember no others. 
 * If you will allow me, Mr. Flowers,' he said, ' to be your banker, 
 until you are in a position to pay them yourself, I will give you a 
 cheque for this amount, and you can have the satisfaction of going 
 round Cambridge this afternoon and paying them all before 
 Hall.' 
 
 Herbert went out of Mr. Routh's room with a big lump in hia 
 throat and a cheque in his hand, and did not get back to Hall till 
 the dinner was nearly over. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXTL 
 
 THE BLACK BOOK. 
 
 ' Who shall so forecast the years, or reach a hand through time to catch 
 The far-off interest of tears ?' 
 
 Herbert did not go down to Bideford at Christmas. It is but a 
 short vacation, and the time had not yet come when he could return 
 with the honour and distinction that he was always dreaming 
 about. 
 
 He had to ' wait a minit,' but the minute was such a long one 
 that, in spite of Mr. Routh's sermon on the wholesome discipline 
 of self-denial, he was getting impatient. 
 
 He went to Camberwell, where Trinity College has a special 
 mission of her own, and initiates her sons in missionary work 
 among the home heathen. Here he met Jayne, who had been 
 working at the mission part of the term, and here, amidst children's 
 dinners and kindred devotional exercises of Christian charity, he 
 spent his Christmas. It was quite a new atmosphere to him, and 
 it was neither emotional nor aesthetic. The walls were very bare, 
 and the work was very practical ; it was not by any means the 
 
THE BLACK BOOK. 251 
 
 artistic clothing of an ideal. There were no interesting sisters or 
 lay female helpers, in white bands becomingly arranged round their 
 pensive features, and blue cords and tassels round their slender 
 waists. 
 
 The only woman that Herbert saw there during his visit was 
 Mary Barclay, who drove over one day to ask Jayne, with whom 
 she was in pretty frequent communication, to send someone to see 
 a protege of hers who had had an accident. Her carriage was 
 waiting to convey the messenger to the man's sick-bed, and the 
 case was very urgent. The man was not expected to live through 
 the night. 
 
 There was no one at the mission but Jayne, and he offered to go 
 at once, and asked Herbert to accompany him. He shrank from the 
 sight of physical suffering. He had never been able to look upon 
 it since that day when Geraint lay dying on his knees in the Lent 
 Races. 
 
 While he was debating with himself, Mary Barclay put her hand 
 in his arm and drew him away. 
 
 1 Come,' she said, c you have promised to be my knight-errant.' 
 
 The drive from Camberwell to Marylebone, where the object of 
 their visit lay, was a long one, through the most crowded parts of 
 London. She had not been able to find spiritual consolation be- 
 fitting the case nearer than the Camberwell Mission. They talked 
 of many things on the way beside the sufferer to whose .bedside 
 they were called — of Jayne's work at the mission, of his ordination. 
 He was to be ordained at Easter under the Bishop of London to a 
 crowded parish in the neighbourhood of Camberwell. The work 
 bis soul hungered for — home missions — would be within his grasp. 
 
 'I am not fit,' Jayne said with a sigh, 'for missionary work 
 abroad. God knows I would have chosen it if I had been, but He 
 has chosen for me. I am such a poor creature to make my way 
 among men, so heavily handicapped among my fellows, but I can 
 just creep from door to door and take my message with me.' 
 
 ' And Mr. Brown ?' Mary Barclay asked with some anxiety ; ' I 
 have heard nothing of him of late. Is he going on well, or is pros- 
 perity spoiling him ?' 
 
 Jayne paused a minute, and looked at a London crowd hanging 
 round the door of a public-house where a fight was going on inside, 
 and the attention of the crowd was rapt. Mary Barclay followed 
 the direction of his eyes, and a look of intelligence passed between 
 them. 
 
 ' It is a good position,' she said, looking round ; ' it is a kind of 
 Seven Dials. There are six dials, at any rate. Will you inquire 
 about it ?' 
 
 Jayne nodded assent. 
 
 ' You were asking about Mr. Brown,' he said, 'and whether pros- 
 perity is spoiling him. I can only answer the question by saying 
 that I do not think ease, too much ease, is good for any man, parti- 
 
252 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 cularly such a man as Brown. The breezy heights of adversity and 
 trial are more bracing, more commensurable with the life that such 
 a nature as Brown's is most fitted for — a life of self-denial and 
 sacrifice. He is, in his way, an enthusiast. He has more power, 
 more real force, though it may be merely spasmodic, than stronger 
 men. I do not know a man in Trinity, I do not know a man in 
 Cambridge, who has more of this vital energy, more of this old 
 martyr spirit that raises men above considerations of personal ease 
 and advantage, and enables them to bear poverty and persecution, 
 and suffering, and martyrdom, if need be, than Brown.' 
 
 Mary Barclay was listening to him with dilated eyes, and her 
 face glowing with a strange sympathy in his words. 
 
 1 1 am so glad,' she said, ' so thankful that — that I have been able 
 to help him ; that he ' (she never spoke of Geraint by name) ' re- 
 cognised this nature in him, and helped him.' 
 
 ' Recognised !' Herbert interrupted. ' G-eraint did not recognise 
 it — he called it forth ; he created this new nature in Brown by his 
 own generous act.' 
 
 ' Then,' she said quietly, ' it is my duty to foster its growth. 
 What can I do for him ? how can I help him ? You say a life of 
 ease — the ordinary curate life — will not do for him, will stunt hi* 
 growth ?' 
 
 Jayne did not answer for a minute ; he kept looking out into the 
 streets as if he had not heard her question. 
 
 ' It is arranged for him to take a curacy under his father, af te» 
 he is ordained at Easter,' Herbert said, breaking the silence 
 ' Could anything better happen to him ? He is a splendid old 
 fellow, and Brown would have the advantage of his teaching ana 
 example, and all the home surroundings.' 
 
 Jayne had finished his survey of the streets, and when he looked 
 at Mary Barclay again his face was very white. 
 
 ' I will never more seek to interfere with God's dealings with mj 
 fellow-men,' he said solemnly. 'He who made them has power 
 over the clay He has fashioned, to make them vessels of honour or 
 dishonour, according to His will. If He has a future for Brown, 
 which these failures and disasters of his have specially fitted him 
 for, and I think He has, He will bring it about in His own way and 
 time, without our interference.' 
 
 They had reached by this time their destination. The carriage 
 stopped at the door of a poor house in a mean street, and a woman, 
 with her apron to her eyes, and her face swollen with weeping, 
 admitted them. 
 
 ' Oh, miss, I am so glad you are come ! His sufferings are awful 
 to witness. They have sent me out of the room because I could 
 not bear to see them without crying out, and they've got a nurse 
 who is used to such cases. You will never go in, miss ; you 
 couldn't bear it, though you don't belong to him. It would kill you. 
 the sight of it, and — and it wouldn't do for you to faint in there.' 
 
THE BLACK BOOK 25J 
 
 She barred the door of the room as she spoke, but Mary Barclay 
 put her aside. 
 
 ' I shall not faint,' she said quietly ; ' I shall not disturb him with 
 a scene.' 
 
 They passed into the room, and left the woman weeping without. 
 It had been a terrible accident, and the crushed and broken limbs 
 had not been set. The man ought to have been taken at once to a 
 hospital, but he had been brought home, and it was too late now to 
 talk of moving him. A hospital surgeon was bending over him, 
 arranging the splints, and a nurse was standing by assisting 
 him. 
 
 They both looked up when the door opened, and seeing they 
 were merely visitors, the surgeon, with a slight exclamation of im- 
 patience, returned to his work. 
 
 Surely visitors were out of place here ? 
 
 Jayne wore no clerical uniform to show the nature of his calling, 
 and he made a terrible noise, in that painful silence, broken only by 
 the groans of the injured man, limping across the room, Herbert's 
 coat was coarse enough, and frayed at the edges ; but he hadn't a 
 rope round his waist, so that he did not belong to any sacred order ; 
 and Mary Barclay's rich dress seemed strangely incongruous with 
 the scene. 
 
 ' Steady, nurse !' the doctor exclaimed sharply ; ' quite steady, 
 if you please !' 
 
 The woman thus adjured bent over her task, and the white 
 starched border of her cap concealed her face, which had whitened 
 suddenly on their entrance. She wore the dress of a nursing 
 sister, and a cross and rosary hung by her side. 
 
 ' It is a bad case,' said Jayne. ' Is the poor fellow sensible ?' 
 
 ' Scarcely,' said the surgeon ; ' he may be for a few minutes 
 before the end. This will give him some relief, if we can manage 
 it.' And again he bent over the crushed and shattered limb, which 
 he was trying with the nurse's aid to straighten out on a splint. 
 
 ' Can I help you ?' said Herbert, coming forward. ' I am very 
 strong.' 
 
 ' It is not strength that is wanted,' said the surgeon, ' but steadi- 
 ness. This woman is trembling so ; it is putting the poor fellow to 
 unnecessary torture. Why, nurse, what is the matter ?' 
 
 The nursing sister raised a pleading white face, that Herbert, 
 with a sudden pang, recognised. She did not look at him ; she only 
 looked at the doctor ; but he caught the sudden flash of the dark 
 eyes, and the tremulous movement of the beautiful mouth, and he 
 recognised her in a moment. It was Hebe Bellenden. 
 
 Mary Barclay, who was standing by the couch, wiping with her 
 handkerchief the heavy dews that had gathered on the brow of the 
 sufferer, came to her aid. 
 ' Let me help you, nurse.' 
 She put out her white, ungloved hands as she spoke, and 
 
254 A FELLOW OF TRIMTY. 
 
 supported the poor mutilated limb. With one swift glance the 
 surgeon expressed his approval of the change. 
 
 ' You can hold it steady V he said. 
 
 ' Quite,' she answered. 
 
 The nursing sister gave up her place, and supported the limb 
 lower down. She had ceased to tremble now ; but when her hand 
 by accident touched the hand of Mary Barclay, she drew it away 
 with a shiver, that called forth another reproof from the doctor. 
 
 Herbert watched them from the other side of the couch — the 
 two women who had loved Geraint, whose death had brought them 
 together, as his life could never have done. 
 
 The task was a harder one than Mary Barclay had expected. It 
 took so long to arrange those never-ending bandages ; and the 
 limb had to be sustained, lightly and steadily by her unaccustomed 
 hands. The strain, after the first few minutes, was almost more 
 than she could bear. Herbert saw her cheek gradually pale, and 
 her brow contract, and her lips pressed tightly together ; but she 
 did not flinch from her task. 
 
 The diamonds on her fingers flashed and scintillated in the light ; 
 but her hands never trembled nor faltered. 
 
 ' Can you hold out three minutes longer ?' the surgeon asked 
 presently. 
 
 She did not trust herself to speak, but she smiled her answer 
 bravely across the bed. He did not ask the nursing sister ; she 
 was used to the work, and, now that the surprise and shock of that 
 first recognition was over, had risen to the occasion. 
 
 Herbert took out his watch and counted the minutes. One ! 
 two ! There was a pink spot on the nursing sister's face, where 
 the rouge used to be, and she had bitten her white lips till they 
 were scarlet ; and there was a strained look of anguish in her eyes, 
 that reminded Herbert of that awful moment in the waiting room 
 at Ely. 
 
 How long the minute-hand was in creeping round ! surely there 
 was something wrong with the works ! Three ! 
 
 The surgeon looked up with a sigh of relief. 
 
 ' Now,' he said briefly ; and the limb, beautifully composed, waa 
 laid tenderly down. 
 
 Mary Barclay's eyes were shining as she looked up with a glow 
 of thankfulness for the strength that had been given her ; and in 
 the same moment Hebe fell back senseless into Herbert's arms. 
 
 He bore her out of the room on to the landing outside, and 
 threw open the window to give her air. The noise and the nameless 
 scents of a foul London court rose up from beneath as they stood 
 there, with only the feeble light of a gas-lamp in the court to show 
 him when the colour came back to the white face on his shoulder. 
 
 Her cap had fallen off, and the pale gold of her lovely hair fell 
 about his shoulders ; and it was no longer the nursing sister, but 
 Hebe Bellenden, the Belle of Cambridge, he held in his arms. 
 
THE BLACK BOOK. J55 
 
 She opened her eyes presently, and shivered. 
 
 1 Shall I close the window ?' he asked. ' Are yon cold ?' 
 
 ' No,' she said wearily ; ' it is not that. I knew her when you 
 brought her in. It is the woman that he gave np for me ! It was 
 for his sake she held out so well ; I read it in her face — her beau- 
 tiful face, that he left for me ! Oh, don't tell me that she held out 
 longer than I did, that she endured more than I did for his 
 sake !' 
 
 'No,' said Herbert, with a shiver that he could not repress. 
 ' You held out one second longer.' 
 
 ' Oh, if he only knew what I am doing and suffering for his sake,' 
 she said, with a little wan smile, ' I think he would forgive me. I 
 have neither home nor friends. I live in the midst of loathsome 
 disease, of filth and squalor and hideous suffering, for his sake. 
 But what is she doing — oh, tell me what is she doing ?' 
 
 She was so eager that she had steadied herself by the window, 
 and was clutching Herbert's arm with convulsive energy, and her 
 eyes were luminous in the darkness. 
 
 'Miss Barclay is spending a million of money,' said Herbert 
 quietly. 
 
 The door opened and Mary Barclay came out of the sick- 
 room. 
 
 ' "Will you call my carriage, Mr. Flowers,' she said, ' if the nurse 
 is well enough to go back to her charge ?' 
 
 Jayne stayed with the sick man, and Herbert drove back with 
 Mary Barclay. 
 
 Herbert was thinking of those rubies of Hebe Bellenden's as he 
 sat looking out into the deserted streets as the carriage wended its 
 way back to Belgravia. Clearly it was his duty to return them, 
 but how ? It was impossible for him to redeem them ; in a few 
 weeks it would be impossible for anyone to redeem them, and they 
 were not pledged for a tithe of their value. Brown knew nothing 
 about the transaction, and if Herbert lost this chance he might 
 never meet with Hebe Bellenden again. 
 
 ' I want you to give me twenty-five pounds,' Herbert said 
 presently ; ' I want it to-night, and — and I want you to give it 
 without asking for what purpose it is required.' 
 
 He asked the favour so awkwardly, and he blushed so ridiculously 
 — she could see it in the lamplight — that Mary Barclay looked at 
 him with a strange inquiry in her eyes, and her brow contracted. 
 
 ' You want it for that woman we have just left ?' she said 
 coldly. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Herbert ; ' you have guessed right. I want it for — 
 for that woman. It is a loan — not made to me, to Brown — that 
 ought to be repaid.' 
 
 ' To Mr. Brown ?' she interrupted scornfully ; ' that woman is a 
 — a friend of Mr. Brown's ?' and before her rose a vision of the 
 nursing sister with her luminous eyes, and the wealth of pale-gold 
 
256 A FELLOW OF TRINITY, 
 
 hair that had escaped from her cap, streaming over her coarse 
 gown. 
 
 ' No,' said Herbert ; ' Brown never saw her in his life. She did 
 it for my sake !' 
 
 ' For yours !' 
 
 The flexible voice was harder and colder, and there waa & ring of 
 bitterness in it. 
 
 1 Yes, for mine,' said Herbert sadly, ' I happened to do her a 
 service — she was pleased to call it a great service — and she helped 
 Brown, without his knowledge, in gratitude for the service I 
 rendered her.' 
 
 ' And you would repay her ?' 
 
 ' I would certainly return the loan with my own money if I had 
 it, and if not with ' 
 
 ' With mine ?' 
 
 ' With yours, if you wish it — if not, the jewels will be lost. I 
 pledged them a year ago. She had not the money ; she could 
 only give him her jewels.' 
 
 ' And she did not know Mr. Brown ?' 
 
 1 He was a perfect stranger to her.' 
 
 ' You shall have the money, Mr. Flowers, to-night. You must 
 have done that lady a great service for her to have repaid it so 
 nobly with her jewels. Was I not right in calling you a knight- 
 errant if you go about fighting the battle of distressed damsels and 
 taking no reward ? I do this for your friend, but is there nothing 
 I can do for you ?' 
 
 Her voice trembled and faltered as she spoke, and Herbert saw 
 that her face had softened, and that she was smiling upon him. 
 He thought for one moment of the little mother, and the bare 
 Christmas hearth, and the poverty, and the struggles that lay before 
 him, and for a moment he hesitated ; then he looked up into the 
 beautiful face and said very quietly : 
 
 ' No ; there is nothing you can do for me. I will fight my own 
 battles, please God ;' and the vision of ease, and comfort, and the 
 world's favour faded suddenly away. 
 
 Jayne received a small packet by registered post the following 
 day, with a letter from Herbert enclosed, requesting him to place 
 it in the hands of the nursing sister who had fainted in the sick- 
 room. 
 
 Brown came up to Cambridge for a few days just before Easter. 
 He had finished his reading ; concluded his arrangements with the 
 Bishop's chaplain, all but a few quite formal preliminaries ; his Si 
 Quis was read in his father's church, and he was to be ordained at 
 Easter. 
 
 He was in the highest possible spirits, and had almost forgotten, 
 in the new delightful atmosphere of prosperity, the failures and 
 disasters that had marked his college career. He called upon the 
 divinity professors quite early in the day, and obtained the 
 
THE BLACK BOOK. 257 
 
 necessary certificates of attendance at their lectures ; but he put 
 off his visit to his old tutor until the afternoon. 
 
 'I wish you would come over with me, Flowers,' he said, beaming 
 at Herbert over the modest cutlets ; ' I must get my college testi- 
 monials this afternoon from Routh. When I have got those 
 I shall have got all the papers that are necessary ;' and he tapped his 
 pocket-book, which lay by his side upon the table, with evident 
 satisfaction. 
 
 Brown looked affectionately round the Great Court, even favour- 
 ing the fountain with a nod of recognition, as he crossed over to Mr. 
 Routh's rooms. He climbed the stairs gaily ; he had never climbed 
 them so gaily before. He recalled smilingly with what a heavy 
 heart, and with what awful premonitory thumpings, he used to 
 climb them in his naughty undergraduate days ; but he had no 
 premonitory thumpings now, not even when he knocked at the 
 tutor's door. 
 
 The well-remembered voice said ' Come in !' and he went in. 
 Not shaky or weak in the knees, by any means. He had forgotten 
 all about his misdeeds, if Mr. Routh hadn't. It was nothing new 
 to him that Mr. Routh received him coldly ; he received everybody 
 coldly, and that particular iciness of demeanour Brown was already 
 familiar with. Still, Routh might have laid it aside now, now 
 that he wore his B. A. gown, with the ribbons well to the front — 
 he had brought it up on purpose to pay this visit. 
 
 ' I am to be ordained, sir, at Easter/ Brown began modestly, but 
 with some amount of pride — Mr. Routh was a divine himself- -' and 
 I have come up to ask you for my college testimonials.' 
 
 Mr. Routh raised his very thin eyebrows perceptibly, and fixed 
 Brown with his cold gray eyes. 
 
 ' I do not think, Mr. Brown,' he said slowly, as if his words froze 
 as they dropped, 'that the college will be disposed to grant you 
 testimonials.' 
 
 ' Not grant testimonials !' Brown gasped, with a distinct sensa- 
 tion of cold water running down his spine. 
 
 ' I cannot recommend them to do so,' Mr. Routh replied dis- 
 couragingly. 
 
 ' Oh, sir, what am I to do ? Will the Bishop ordain me without 
 them ?' 
 
 Brown's face had gone quite white, and the smile with which he 
 had greeted the fountain had died quite out of it. 
 
 ' The Bishop certainly will not unless you can explain satisfac- 
 torily the grounds upon which testimonials have been refused.' 
 
 Mr. Routh's face was very grave as he spoke, and he looked 
 severely over his glasses at the crestfallen graduate feebly twirling 
 his ribbons. 
 
 Brown groaned aloud. 
 
 ' Surely, sir,' he said, the college will not be so hard, so un- 
 generous. Oh, sir, what have I done to deserve this ?' 
 
 17 
 
258 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' I will show you what you have done,' said the tutor quietly 
 ' The college authorities are neither hard nor ungenerous. They 
 are simply just, as you will allow when you have seen this.' 
 
 He took down from a shelf as he spoke a large folio volume, and 
 opened it on the table before him. 
 
 ' There,' said he, pointing to the closely-ruled pages, and running 
 his finger down the margin till he came to his name. ' There, Mr. 
 Brown, is the record of your University career from the first term 
 to the last — your chapels, lectures, gates, fines, breaches of college 
 discipline, the letters you have received from the Dean, the repri- 
 mands you have received from your tutor, the offences for which 
 fou have been proctorized, the examinations you have failed in, 
 the terms you have been sent down.' 
 
 The Black Book was open before him — the record of all the 
 omissions and commissions of those stormy years, set down with 
 painful neatness and exactitude. All the follies and excesses of his 
 thoughtless youth laid bare — all the lost opportunities, the reckless 
 disregard of authority, the humiliating defeats, the crowning shame 
 and failure — it was all there, beautifully written with an inexor- 
 able pen. No gentle recording angel had dropped a tear — had not 
 made a blot, even — to wipe out a single record of Mr. Brown's 
 undergraduate career. 
 
 Brown looked ruefully down the dismal list as Mr. Routh made 
 & running commentary upon it. 
 
 ' To obtain college testimonials, you are expected to attend 
 chapel six times at least during the week and twice on Sundays. 
 In your first term you kept nine chapels, in your second six, in 
 your third three. This was the record of your freshman's year. In 
 your second year you kept, during the three terms, seventeen 
 chapels, and in your third year nine. You have received a letter 
 from the Dean once every term of your three years' residence, 
 warning you that your neglect of chapels would disqualify you for 
 testimonials for Holy Orders. Three letters from the Dean are 
 fatal, and you have received nine.' 
 
 ' Oh, sir,' said Brown ; but he couldn't get any further. He had 
 forgotten all about these sins of his youth, and he thought every- 
 body eke had. It was like the dead rising up to witness against 
 him. It was like the opening of another Book. He stood silent 
 and guilty before that awful record. By his own deeds he was 
 judged. 
 
 ' In the face of all this, Mr. Brown,' said the tutor in his hard, 
 even tones, ' you will see that the college authorities could not 
 conscientiously grant testimonials.' 
 
 ' No,' said Brown ; and then looking from that black list to 
 Herbert's kind face, and reading the true manly sympathy written 
 in every line of it, he broke down and burst into tears. 
 
 ' My poor fellow I' said Herbert ; and he laid his hand on hia 
 shoulder. ' Oh, sir,' he said, appealing to Mr. Routh with tears 
 
THE BLACK BOOK. 259 
 
 rising in his eyes, 'do not judge him too harshly; yon know his 
 repentance is sincere. To his own Master he standeth or falleth.' 
 
 ' I do not judge him,' said Mr. Routh, ' Heaven forbid ! but I 
 cannot ignore the painful records of this book. Mr. Brown must 
 write to the Bishop and tell him the truth ; and after a time of 
 probation, if his repentance is sincere, he may accept him.' 
 
 There was nothing more to be said, and Herbert led Brown out, 
 of the room. The tears were streaming down his face over hi'* 
 ribbons, and he had quite lost his self-control. There were men 
 flying up the stairs, and Herbert wasn't quite master of himself, 
 and they looked like two schoolboys after a whipping coming out 
 of the tutor's room, so he drew him aside into a lecture-room 
 beyond that fortunately was empty. Brown didn't nod to the 
 fountain on his way back, and he didn't regard the Great Court, 
 the scene of so many shameful defeats and disasters, with any 
 particular favour. He crept humbly up the familiar staircase, and 
 when he was once in Herbert's room, out of the sight of inquisitive 
 eyes, he threw himself on his knees beside Herbert's couch, and 
 buried his poor tear-stained face in his pillow. 
 
 1 It is just,' he groaned : ' but it is justice without mercy. I am 
 only reaping the harvest that I have sown !' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE STOKY OF THE DEAN'S RING. 
 
 • . . . Men may rise on stepping-stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things. ' 
 
 When Herbert came out of Hall, instead of returning to his rooms, 
 he turned involuntarily the other way, and went through the 
 cloisters in the direction of the Dean's staircase. Brown had gone 
 over to Emmanuel to pour out his trouble to Harvard. 
 
 There was a bght burning in the Dean's window, and Herbert 
 took heart and went np. The Dean was writing when Herbert 
 went in, but he pushed aside his papers and asked him to take the 
 vacant chair by the hearth. There was something in Herbert's 
 manner that arrested attention as he declined the chair and came 
 up to the table where he was writing and stood by his side. 
 
 ' You told me once, sir,' he began, ' to come to you if I was in 
 trouble or extremity of any kind, and that you would help me ;' 
 and he glanced down involuntarily on the Dean's ring, which had 
 caught the light from the shaded candles, and shone like a watchful 
 eye upon the hand that rested on the table. 
 
 The Dean followed the direction of his eyes and smiled. 
 
 17—2 
 
260 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 ' And you have taken me at my word ?' he said kindly. 
 
 ' I have taken you at your word, sir. I am in trouble now, and 
 I have come to you for your help.' 
 
 And then, standing there, looking down at the watchful eye, he 
 told the Dean the story of Brown's disappointment, and the ship- 
 wreck of all his hopes. The Dean knew it all before, but he 
 listened patiently, and with a ready sympathy, as if the story 
 were not as old as the hills — youthful folly, recklessness, shame, 
 despair, contrition, repentance, in their natural order and se- 
 quence. 
 
 Herbert dwelt on the sincerity of Brown's repentance, on his 
 deep convictions and earnestness, and urged that this stumbling- 
 block in his way would dishearten and discourage him, and blight 
 all his prospects. 
 
 Tbe Dean listened to the end. 
 
 ' You have pleaded your friend's cause well, Mr. Flowers,' he 
 said ; ' but Mr. Brown has a better advocate here ;' and he smiled 
 sadly down upon the ring. ' I never tell this story except to men 
 who come to me in trouble ; you may tell it to your friend, but 
 to none other. I had a brother, a very dear brother, the youngest 
 of a large family — a manly, generous fellow, a perfect Absalom 
 for beauty and strength, and most tenderly beloved by us all. 
 He was an undergraduate here in Cambridge, and fell, in his 
 first year, when he was only a boy let loose from school, taking 
 his first flight, into a fast set. He was easily led, and fell into 
 temptation ; went, indeed, from one excess to another ; grew reck- 
 less, desperate — there was no one to counsel him, no hand stretched 
 
 out to succour him ' The Dean's voice faltered as he spoke, 
 
 and he put his hand across his eyes. l It was Mr. Brown's story 
 over again,' he said presently, ' without the merciful intervention. 
 It broke his parents' heart. He was their pride — the joy of their 
 age. They sank under it. My father died within six months, and 
 my mother died during the year. Before they died they implored 
 me, for his sake, never to be harsh or severe with any man who 
 came to me in trouble. I have worn this ring since their death to 
 remind me of my promise. You see it has their hair in it.' And 
 he held the ring up to the light, that Herbert might see the strands 
 of faded hair beneath the glass. ' It is like seeing their dear faces. 
 If I am in doubt, and am tempted to be hasty or severe, these 
 kind counsellors are always at hand to advise me. Many an under- 
 graduate of Trinity has to thank them, and not me, for the leniency 
 shown him. I should have sent many a man down but for the 
 pleading voice that speaks to me from the ring, " Give him another 
 chance. Think of his mother !" ' 
 
 Herbert went direct from the Dean's rooms to Emmanuel College 
 Jo find Brown, and tell him that the Dean would be glad to see 
 him. Brown was not in Harvard's rooms, but on Harvard's table 
 was a freshly -written message, saying that they had gone to a meet- 
 
THE STORY OF THE DEAN'S RING. 261 
 
 ing held at the Guildhall, and asking Herbert to join them 
 there. 
 
 The large hall was so crowded when Herbert got there that he 
 could not make his way to the front, where a great many University 
 men were collected. In a knot of men under the platform he saw 
 Brown. He knew him a long way off, in a moment, by his red 
 eyes and his white face, and his generally limp appearance. 
 
 The object of the meeting was to welcome back some Cambridge 
 men who had lately returned from the mission-field. They had 
 gone out before Herbert's time, and were strangers to him ; he had 
 not even heard of them. They had not taken high places in the 
 lists, they had won no University laurels ; but there could be no 
 mistake in the heartiness of their reception. It quite moved them 
 when they came-modestly forward, a little band browned by Indian 
 suns and bearing the unmistakable lines of toil and suffering on 
 their faces. They told the tale of their labours in a quiet, un- 
 affected way, touching lightly on their privations and sufferings, 
 acknowledging failures, and giving God the glory for whatever 
 measure of success had been vouchsafed to them. 
 
 One by one they got up and sat down, looking dreadfully uncom- 
 fortable and shamefaced for having so little to tell. It had all 
 been real enough, and hard enough to bear, Heaven knew at the 
 time, and all that they had passed through He only knew whose 
 servants they were ; but it seemed very little to tell when told in 
 a few brief words before that eager audience. 
 
 The last speaker was greeted with applause by the University 
 men under the platform. He had been the best half-back in the 
 University football team. He had come home on the sick-list, and 
 his face looked worn and white beneath the bronze, but his 
 dark bright eyes were glowing with enthusiasm. He had nothing 
 very heroic, he said, to tell them. He should have had nothing 
 at all to tell them if the work had depended upon him. He 
 believed he was chosen out of that University because he was the 
 worst man in it. If not the worst, he was certainly the weakest. 
 That had been his only qualification for the work : his weakness. 
 He told how he had been chosen from among many others — men 
 who had taken high degrees, who had led exemplary lives, had 
 never been tempted, had never fallen — how all these had been set 
 aside, and the poor earthen vessel that had got nothing in it, that 
 was emptied of self, had been chosen before the vessels of silver 
 and of gold. 
 
 He was quite in earnest, and his brave, worn face glowed with 
 enthusiasm as he spoke of the blessedness of the work to which he 
 had been called — a blessedness he described with that wonderful 
 exaltation that Herbert had sometimes seen before on the faces of 
 other men in Cambridge — he had seen it on Jayne's, on Harvard's 
 — a blessedness that was a much loftier and deeper thing than 
 happiness. He called upon those who were there, who had found 
 
262 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 disenchantment in success, weariness in riches, satiety in self-in- 
 dulgence, to help them, and taste of this blessedness. 
 
 It was only picked men that they wanted — men who were 
 emptied of self. He appealed to his old University friends, who 
 had taken their degrees, and the undergraduates who were filling 
 the great army of the Church, to come forward and say, ' Here am 
 I ; send me !' 
 
 Herbert thought he did hear a voice he knew very well repeat- 
 ing these words, but it was drowned in the cheers that closed the 
 eloquent appeal of the last speaker. 
 
 Herbert went back to Trinity alone, for he could find neither 
 Harvard nor Brown in the crowd that poured out of the hall. 
 He had been bask nearly two hours, sitting alone in his room, 
 with the speaker's last words, ' Send me !' ringing in his ears, 
 when Brown came in. 
 
 His eyes were no longer red and his cheeks pale. His face was 
 shining, and there was the light one doesn't see very often on the 
 unemotional faces of one's friends — the light of ecstasy. 
 
 ' It's ad right, dear boy !' Brown exclaimed, coming over to 
 Herbert and shaking him heartily by the hand ; ' it's all right ; I 
 have found my vocation at last. The society has accepted me, and 
 I am going to the Soudan as a missionary.' 
 
 Then Herbert told him about his visit to the Dean, and that he 
 had promised to write to the Bishop. 
 
 Brown was far too elated to be moved even by this unexpected 
 kindness. 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' he said, with a little catch in his voice, and his 
 eyes beaming with that strange fire, ' I understand it all now — all 
 my failures and disappointments. It came to me in a flash while 
 that fellow was speaking — the vessel broken on the wheel, the rude, 
 empty, misshapen vessel, rejected of men, fitted by its very empti- 
 ness for the Master's use, that the excellency might be all of 
 Him.' 
 
 ' You've hit the right nail on the head at last, old man,' said 
 Harvard, who had just found a convenient bit of wall-room to lean 
 against. ' I think the tracks are pretty clear, clear as the fire and 
 the cloud that guided a people once through a certain wilderness, 
 that has always seemed to me to typify human life. There's been 
 a good deal of cloud in your life, Brown, old man, but you've hit 
 upon the right beacon at last. You stick to missionary work, old 
 man. A life of ease and lawn-tennis in a country parish, with that 
 old governor of yours, would have been the ruin of you. What- 
 ever there's good in you '11 have to be wrung out, threshed out by 
 hardships and trials, and martyrdom, if need be. I do believe, 
 Brown, that the honour of martyrdom may yet be yours ! Yon 
 may be going out to torture and to death, as you certainly are 
 going out with your life in your hands, to a terrible climate, amid 
 a fanatical race. I've half a mind, indeed, to go with you myself.' 
 
THE STORY OF THE DEAN'S RING. 263 
 
 1 No, really ?' said Brown ; and his face beamed across the table 
 as if he had been promised a very distinguished honour. 
 
 The picture Harvard drew did not shake Brown's resolution. 
 The mission accepted him to go out as a layman if need be ; to go 
 out as an ordained preacher, if a Bishop could be found to ordain 
 him ; but to go out in any case. 
 
 There was not a happier man in Trinity than Brown when he 
 came up again some time later to take leave of his friends in 
 Trinity. He had so many good-wishers who crowded round him 
 at that last supreme moment. He couldn't see one of them for 
 the mist that blurred all their familiar faces into one — a shining 
 one. 
 
 The most affecting parting was with his old tutor, Mr. Routh. 
 He went in to him alone with a grave face ; he didn't even 
 acknowledge the fountain on the way. He hadn't any favour to ask 
 now ; the Black Book had no longer any terrors for him. The 
 discipline was all over, and he was going to thank the kind, just 
 hand that had inflicted it. 
 
 He stayed a long time in that inner room, and the sunshine had 
 slipped off the grass of the court, and was climbing the gray wall 
 of the college chapel, when he came out. The court was full of 
 men, but he did not seek to hide his tear-stained face from them, 
 as he came, for the last time, crying like a whipped schoolboy from 
 the tutor's room. 
 
 It was very soon after the Rev. Richard Brown started for the 
 Soudan, with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night 
 hanging over the Peninsular and Oriental steamship that conveyed 
 him to the scene of his labours, that Herbert received a hasty 
 summons to Bideford. 
 
 Lucy had been ailing through the spring — a chill English spring 
 — and now, without any previous warning, Herbert was summoned 
 hurriedly to her bedside. The summons was written in an un- 
 familiar hand, and it was very brief. Its very brevity alarmed him. 
 He read in it the thoughtful consideration of his mother who would 
 not suffer him to be alarmed, and it alarmed him the more, and, 
 having obtained an exeat, he started for Bideford by the next train. 
 
 It was quite late in the night when he arrived, the train had 
 stopped so long at Exeter — at least, it seemed so long to him. 
 
 The moon was up when he reached Bideford, and it shone upon 
 his path through the branches of the old elm-trees as he climbed 
 the familiar road, and there was a strange hush he noticed in the 
 air. The trees no longer whispered to him ; the last year's leaves 
 had all blown away, and the branches were bare. 
 
 There was a light in the upper room of the cottage, and the latch 
 of the door was down. 
 
 While he stood shaking it in his old impatient way, he heard a 
 step on the stairs — a strange step — and the door was opened. The 
 woman who opened it carried a light in her hand. He looked at 
 
264 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 her with a bewildered air, and a sudden pain at his heart. It waa 
 Julie. 
 
 'You are surprised to see me,' she said, drawing him in and 
 closing the door softly. ' I am nursing your mother.' 
 
 She was so unlike the Julie of former days that no wonder he 
 was bewildered. Her face was pale, and her dress untidy ; the 
 fringe and the little kiss-me-quick curls were gone, and her hair 
 was pinned up in a knot behind that looked as If it had not been 
 taken down for many days. 
 
 ' My mother ! Oh, Julie, how good of you ! How is she ?' 
 
 ' Hush !' she said, putting her finger to her lips. It was a very 
 dirty finger, and her hands were coarse and soiled, as if with house- 
 hold work. ' She will hear you ; she was sleeping when I left her, 
 and I must prepare her. The shock of seeing you without might 
 kill her.' 
 
 ' Good God ! Julie ; she is not so bad as that.' 
 
 All the colour had gone out of the poor boy's face, and his eyes 
 had a look of unspeakable alarm in them that went to the woman's 
 vain, tricksy heart. 
 
 ' She is very ill,' she said softly, laying her hand gently upon his 
 arm. He didn't shrink from it now, though it was soiled and rough 
 with dirty work. ' She would not have sent for you else, the 
 weakness has increased so fast. I did not think that she could last 
 until you came.' 
 
 ' Oh, why was I not sent for before ? Why did you let it go on 
 so long without telling me ?' 
 
 He wrung his hands in his impotent grief, and Julie drew him 
 into the room beyond, lest the sound of his wailing should go 
 before her up the stairs. 
 
 It was the old familiar kitchen, dark and deserted now ; there 
 was no fire in the grate, and the chimney-corner where he had sat 
 in his childhood was empty— no, not empty, for his own little stool 
 was still there. 
 
 The sight of it, beside that desolate hearth, brought the tears to 
 his eyes. The dearest memories of his life hung round those happy, 
 innocent days, when he sat on the old stool by the kitchen firelight. 
 
 Julie followed the direction of his eyes. 
 
 ' Ah,' she said, clasping her hands in her foreign way, ' the place 
 looks deserted ! "We have had no fire here for a week ; we have had 
 it night and day upstairs. There is no one to chop wood or carry 
 coals, so we have done without it.' 
 
 ' Is there no servant ?' Herbert asked impatiently. 
 
 It hurt him dreadfully to see the dear old place look so forlorn 
 and neglected. He had never seen it dirty in his life, and now the 
 dust lay thick on everything, and its desolation was aggravated by 
 squalor that the candle-light but half revealed. 
 
 ' There has been no servant for months,' said Julie. ' Your 
 mother could not afford to keep one. And — and when I came to 
 
 
THE STORY OF THE DEAN'S RING. 265 
 
 her I helped her with the work. It has been neglected while she 
 has been ill. I have sat up with her every night, and I have been 
 too tired and too distrait to do much by day.' 
 
 'Oh, Julie,' Herbert said, 'how good of you! I can chop the 
 wood now, and help you if, please God, we can only bring the dear 
 mother round again.' 
 
 There was a sound of a weak cough in the room above, and Julie 
 flew up the stairs and left Herbert standing in the kitchen among 
 his desolate household gods. 
 
 Lucy had been ailing all the winter, and a neglected cold had 
 brought on inflammation of the lungs. In her unselfish economy 
 she had not sought medical advice until too late. She had been 
 lunching herself for years, and now, through a hard winter and a 
 cruel spring, she had done without the assistance of the little maid, 
 and undermined her constitution by exposure and labours beyond 
 her strength. 
 
 Herbert was shocked to see the change that these few months 
 had wrought in the dear face when he bent over it, and kissed the 
 damp forehead. 
 
 'My darling !' she whispered. 
 
 The voice was unchanged, though the breathing was laboured, 
 and the dear eyes dwelt upon his face with a devouring love he had 
 never seen in any other. 
 
 He was silent. He could not trust himself to speak, as be sat 
 with her hand in his, watching the dear face and listening to the 
 short, laboured breath. He thought of many things while he sat 
 there, and reproached himself that — that there had been so little 
 confidence between them. Perhaps she read the vain regrets, the 
 unavailing remorse and contrition, in his stricken face as he 
 watched beside her through the night. The scales had fallen from 
 her eyes now, if there had ever been any, and she read the boy's 
 troubled soul like the clear face of a mirror. Did she not, above 
 all others, know how true and tender and manly his heart was ? 
 There never had been but one cloud between them, and now that 
 had passed away. 
 
 If she had wronged him in her heart, her secret heart, that had 
 borne so bravely the scoffs and reproaches of her great neighbours 
 at the Court, of her lowly neighbours in the town, it was all over 
 now. Julie was there ministering to her, and she smiled up into 
 the tired face as she pressed some nourishment upon her. 
 
 ' No, let me,' said Herbert ; and he took the cup from the 
 woman's hand. 
 
 ' She has been very good to me,' said Lucy, following her with 
 her wistful eyes ; ' she has nursed me like a daughter. You murt 
 be kind to her for my sake ; she has been cruelly wronged.' 
 
 The cough prevented her saying more, and she fell back on the 
 pillow gasping for breath. 
 
 ' I will not hie down if you let her talk,' said Julie, coming back 
 
266 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 from that inner room where she had thrown herself, dressed as she 
 was, on a couch for a few hours' rest while Herbert watched. ' It 
 will kill her if you let her excite herself. She must be kept very 
 quiet.' 
 
 Herbert promised to be careful, and she went back into the room, 
 leaving the door ajar. 
 
 Lucy lay back breathing with great difficulty through the night, 
 with her tender eyes fixed upon his face, and her hand in his. 
 They had so much to say to each other at this supreme moment, 
 and they said so little. Perhaps that silent language was best 
 understood. 
 
 She was so peaceful, so happy ; the work of her life was done — 
 oh, so well done ! Her boy's future was assured. He had already 
 won success, distinction ; and Fame, even now in that poor room, 
 was unrolling her Honoris Causd before her failing eyes. She had 
 nothing left to do but to give him her blessing. 
 
 Herbert sat with swelling heart by her side, recalling all her 
 tenderness in the past — all the acts of unspeakable devotion that 
 had blessed his life, and reproaching himself, at that supreme 
 moment, for his thoughtless neglect and coldness. He never once 
 thought of Mary Barclay during that silent watch ; but once he 
 wished that Lilian Howell could have been the ministering angel 
 there, as he had seen her beside another bed. And then his 
 thoughts for the first time reverted to the woman whose heavy 
 breathing he had heard in the inner chamber. 
 
 Lucy was watching him, and seemed to read his thoughts as he 
 glanced over to the open door. 
 
 ' She has been cruelly deceived,' she whispered, as she followed 
 the direction of his eyes. ' He took her away, and — and there was 
 a marriage, and — and he — they gave out that it was you.'' 
 
 Herbert saw it all in a moment. The scorn and coldness of his 
 friends ; the sudden aversion of Lilian Howell ; Spurway's con- 
 fusion, and the secrecy he had imposed upon him — it was all quite 
 clear now. 
 
 ' Thank God it isn't, mother,' he said ; and he stooped down and 
 kissed her. ' It might have been. I have been very foolish and 
 easily led. I have reason to say every day of my life the words I 
 learnt at your knee, " Lead us not into temptation." 'j 
 
 She smiled, and looked up at the white ceiling, and a light came 
 into her face. 
 
 •Would you like me to say it once more beside you, mother ?' he 
 said ; ' there is not a day in my life since I have been away that I 
 have not said it, and thought of you.' 
 
 She laid her hand upon his head as he knelt there, and repeated 
 the words that she had taught him when a little child, and a look 
 of ineffable tenderness and peace came into her eyes, and her lips 
 softly repeated the familiar words after him. 
 
 But even while he was kneeling there the dear voice faltered 
 
SPURWAY'S CONFESSION. 267 
 
 and failed, and the lips quivered ; and he repeated the last words 
 alone, Tor Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory !' 
 Surely there was a change ? The lips were still and smiling, and 
 the dear face lay peacefully against his breast — a face with a glory 
 "ver it — but the little mother had gone away. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 SPURWAY'S CONFESSION. 
 
 • I sometimes hold it half a sin 
 To put in words the grief I feel.' 
 
 Herbert returned to Cambridge directly after the funeral. They 
 buried Lucy in the same grave with the old coach. Herbert used 
 to play about it when he was a boy, and he remembered, as he 
 stood there, looking down into the yawning chasm that held every- 
 thing he loved on earth, how he used to leap over that g*een 
 mound with a certain pride of ownership in it. It was his only 
 freehold. 
 
 There were no wreaths sent by sympathizing friends to lay 
 upon the widow's plain coffin. There was only a little crots ol 
 spring flowers, made by Julie's deft fingers, and wet with the only 
 unselfish tears she had ever shed. Nobody missed her, she had 
 led such a lonely life, and everybody had stood aloof from her in 
 her poverty, and, alas ! kind words were the only form of chi rity 
 that endeared her to her poorer neighbours. 
 
 Herbert's grief was too fresh to allow him to talk about his loss 
 to his friends when he returned to Cambridge. Indeed, few knew 
 the loss he had sustained, and he shrank from sympathy wi4h a 
 bitter, unreasoning impatience. It was his first real sorrow, aicd in 
 these early days all the aims and objects of his life had no longer 
 any value or meaning to him. Work came as a relief, a panacea 
 for pain ; and for its own sake, for the gift it brought of ceaseless 
 occupation of the mind and weariness of body, he clung to it with 
 a fierce tenacity. 
 
 He stayed up through the short vacation — he had nowhere to go 
 down to now — and worked like a horse. He was a perfect shadow 
 of his former self when he went in in May for his Tripos 
 examination. 
 
 Mr. Eouth watched him with some anxiety. He had no doubt 
 about the result ; his only fear was that he would break down 
 before the examination was over. He knew the story of his loss, 
 and he had wisely encouraged him to fly to the Consoler "Who 
 alone outstrips time in this especial gift of healing. Perhaps he 
 
268 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 had tried it himself? There might have been a green grave 
 somewhere in his memory ; there is in most men's. 
 
 In that last three months of prodigious labour Herbert had, if 
 not exactly broken the neck of another Tripos, bent at least its 
 iron sinew. He was quite sure of a place — somewhere ; he didn't 
 mind where now — in the Classical Tripos, and at the last moment 
 he decided to take mathematics at the same time. 
 
 It had been his intention to wait another year, and thus, maybe, 
 get a double-first ; but now things were altered, and success and 
 failure, seen through the gray medium of his sorrow, were very 
 much alike. 
 
 He found that in coming back to his work, in the first rawness 
 of his grief, the dear face that he had lost was for ever looking 
 out at him from the familiar pages of the immortals, who told the 
 same story — the old, old-fashioned story of human loss and sorrow. 
 He could find no consolation here, but in the tougher region of 
 mathematics he could keep memory at arm's length. 
 
 It was quite a trouble to him when the examinations were all 
 over, and he had nothing to do but to fold his hands and await the 
 results. His occupation was gone, and if he didn't exactly weep, 
 like Alexander, because he hadn't another Tripos to conquer, he 
 broke utterly down — not, as he complained, from overwork, but 
 for the lack of it. 
 
 His tutor wanted him to go down to Hunstanton, Lynn, any- 
 where out of sight of examiners and the Senate-house, until the 
 lists were out. But Herbert was not to be persuaded. He hadn't 
 the money to begin with, and he had not the all-absorbing interest 
 in the result that happier men had. He had worked for the last 
 month until he could literally neither see, stand, nor sit. He never 
 went out during this time save to Hall and chapel, and then he 
 would go back to his rooms and work till dawn the next day. He 
 had no longer any interest in his college boat, he had not played 
 cricket this season, and he had given up his running at Fenner's. 
 Whatever strength of body or mind he had, he had resolutely 
 brought it to bear on the subjects he set before him, and, in his 
 fierce grasp of them, he had excluded everything else. 
 
 When the strain was over he hadn't very much energy of mind 
 or body left. He left his commons untasted, and he seldom came 
 to Hall, and he walked about the courts in his ragged gown and 
 his limp, disreputable cap, with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, 
 a mote in the sweet June sunshine. Lilian Howell met him some- 
 times in his solitary walks, and looked after him with a strange 
 pity and softening in her sweet eyes. She had heard from Muriel 
 Spurway of his mother's death, and maybe of Julie, the abandoned, 
 being still beneath his mother's roof. She was very sorry for him, 
 but she didn't tell him so, and if she looked his way in chapel, it 
 was at her betrothed, who sat on a bench near him. 
 
 He understood it all now. Her cold looks, her sudden aversion, 
 
SPURWAY'S CONFESSION. 269 
 
 all were explained. He would have chafed under it terribly once, 
 but now, with that fierce, dull misery in his heart, he was in- 
 different to it. What could it matter to her now whether he were 
 innocent or guilty ? It was better, surely it was better, that she 
 should believe him guilty than the man that she had promised to 
 marry. 
 
 Spurway had told him, on his oath, that it was all off with the 
 little governess, and Julie was living in poverty and seclusion. 
 Why should this cruel story ever reach her pure ears ? It were 
 better that he should suffer a thousand times than that her inno- 
 cent maiden peace should be disturbed. 
 
 He told himself so, and he thought he believed it ; but in his 
 heart he chafed beneath the injustice of the imputation that a 
 word of Spurway's could remove. 
 
 On the eve of the day when the lists of the Classical Tripes 
 would be out, a terrible thunderstorm broke over Cambridge, and 
 raged for hours with ever-increasing violence. It had been a 
 sultry day, and the heat, even in the cool of the evening, was 
 unbearable. 
 
 Every window was open in the Great Court, and in not a few of 
 the rooms men were celebrating their successes, or drowning their 
 failures in wining with friends. There was more shouting and 
 uproar than usual, but above all the lusty cheers and the noisy 
 choruses rose the sullen roar of the thunder. 
 
 Herbert sat by the open window watching the lightning flashing 
 in continuous sheets across the sky and lighting up the court like 
 daylight, but by-and-by there came a sheet of lurid flame, more 
 vivid than the rest, and he felt its hot breath scorching his face, 
 and he rose hurriedly and shut the window. As he stood there, 
 with the lightning playing around him, he saw a figure hurrying 
 across the court. The thunder that followed was so terrific that it 
 shook every pane of glass in Trinity, and the solid stone building 
 quivered beneath it. It was quite impossible to hear any other 
 sounds ; and presently his door opened and a man with a terribly 
 scared face came in. 
 
 It was Spurway, who had just left the Lodge, and had sought 
 shelter in Herbert's staircase. He was very white, and trembling 
 all over. 
 
 'I believe I'm struck !' he said, when he could speak at all, or 
 had a chance of being heard, for the thunder was now continuous. 
 ' It scorched me as I ran through it, and — and I'm sure I smelt the 
 sulphur.' 
 
 Herbert reassured him that he was all right, and gave him a 
 glass of water. He had nothing else to give him ; but, as he kept 
 shaking and trembling in every limb, like a man with ague, he 
 offered to go to another man's rooms and get him some brandy. 
 
 As he was speaking the room was lit up by a blue flame of light- 
 ning, that seemed to hiss through it, and a frightful peal of 
 
37o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 thunder, of quite appalling duration, again shook the building. 
 Spur way clung to hitn in sudden frenzy of alarm, and his shaking 
 hands were clammy cold, and great beads of perspiration stood out 
 on his forehead. 
 
 ' Oh, Flowers,' he cried, ' for Heaven's sake don't leave me !' 
 
 Herbert soothed him and put him in a big chair, with his back 
 to the window ; but he would not leave go his hand. 
 
 ' You don't mind my holding you ?' he whispered ; ' I was 
 never so upset in my life. The lightning has completely dazed 
 me.' 
 
 Even as he spoke a great flame with many tongues was playing 
 among the steel fire-irons on the hearth before him, and the broken 
 old mirror above the mantelpiece — where Alice had gone through 
 so long ago — fell with a crash to the floor. 
 
 With his disengaged hand, Herbert threw the hearthrug over 
 the steel things in the fireplace, and pushed the chair away ; but 
 still Spurway clung convulsively to his hand. He was a muscular 
 fellow, who could put the weight, or throw the hammer further 
 than any man in Trinity, and the involuntary contraction of his 
 strong hand over Herbert's was like the grip of a vice. 
 
 • Oh, Flowers,' he whispered, with his shaking voice, ' is— it — the 
 — the judgment ?' 
 
 bjo. awtul peal of thunder answered him, and drowned Herbert's 
 words — a crackling, rending peal, making, as it were, great fissures 
 in the air ; and tongues of forked lightning filled the room — light- 
 ning that could be heard as well as seen, and that whizzed by with 
 the peculiar hissing sound of a rocket. 
 
 ' Oh, I am so unready !' he moaned. ' I have led such a thought- 
 less life. Lord, help me !' 
 
 Again the blinding flash of the lightning filled the room, and 
 the thunder broke fiercely overhead as if threatening instant 
 destruction. 
 
 'Do you think He will, Flowers ? Oh, is it too late ?' 
 
 ' If your repentance is real and sincere, it is certainly not too 
 late,' said Herbert. 
 
 He could not free his hand, and the inexorable grip held him 
 tighter and tighter, as if his fingers were wedged in an instrument 
 of torture. 
 
 ' Real ? I am awfully sorry for — for my cursed folly. I wish 
 I had never seen that woman. It was her fault more than mine, 
 Flowers.' 
 
 The awful voice of the thunder drowned his bitter accusations 
 against the partner in his folly. 
 
 ' Is there no reparation you can make ?' 
 
 Herbert made an effort to get his hand free now, but the other 
 clung to it with the tenacity of a dying man. 
 
 ' Oh, don't leave me, Flowers ! I'll do anything you like. I'll 
 tell Lilian all. She'll throw me over. I know ; but I won't deceive 
 
SPUR WAY'S CONFESSION. V}\ 
 
 her any longer. Oh, Flowers, you don't know what an angel 
 she is !' 
 
 Herbert smiled, though the lightning was playing round him, 
 and his head was confused with the incessant roar of the thunder. 
 He hadn't seen her sitting beneath the organ-loft of Trinity for 
 three years without finding out what an angel she was, though she 
 might as well have been an angel in heaven as sitting there, for 
 anything she could ever be to him. 
 
 ' You'll tell her all ?' he repeated gravely. 
 
 • I will, indeed ; I swear it ! She thinks it was you. Flowers, but 
 if I live through this I'll tell her ' 
 
 Again a deafening roar drowned his words and the oath on his 
 trembling lips. 
 
 Before it had subsided the door of Herbert's room opened and 
 Mr. Routh came in. 
 
 The force of habit was so strong upon the two undergraduates, that, 
 though the earth beneath them seemed to reel like a drunken man, 
 and the elements around were consuming in the fervent heat of the 
 lightning, they both stood up when the tutor entered the room — 
 but Spurway did not relax his hold. 
 
 ' Sit down ; pray sit down !' said the tutor, and he came over and 
 sat on the couch beside them. 
 
 'I came over,' he explained, when he could be heard -at all, 
 ' because I thought, as you were not very strong just now, you 
 might be nervous, Mr. Flowers. It is an awful night. I never 
 remember anything like it.' 
 
 ' No ?' Herbert said absently. 
 
 He was thinking more of that promised revelation on the morrow, 
 and what Lilian Howell would say when she learnt the truth, than 
 of the storm. 
 
 ' You do not see the extent of it here like we do from my side,' 
 the tutor went on. ' I have left the Dean on his knees praying for 
 the rain. Unless it ceases or the rain comes, something terrible will 
 happen, Professor Smith tells me. He has been up in his observa- 
 tory all through it, until he could stand it no longer ; the lightning 
 played about his instruments so that he was obliged to desist. I 
 believe he has taken some photographs of it.' 
 
 ' What would be Likely to happen, sir ?' Spurway asked. 
 
 'Something very solemn — something for which we are quite 
 unprepared. Professor Smith tells me that he never knew the air 
 so charged with electricity before. If this should continue to increase 
 and the rain does not come, the town will be on fire. All the lower 
 part seemed from my window to be in flames already. I think we 
 should pray at such a moment for all who are in danger and 
 extremity.' 
 
 The tutor knelt down, and the men beside him, Spurway still 
 clinging to Herbert's hand. 
 
 1 1 will tell her to-morrow, Flowers, so help me, Heaven ! if I 
 
272 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 live through this,' he whispered between his chattering teeth as he 
 knelt beside him. 
 
 As the tutor's voice rose low and clear between the peals of 
 thunder, there came an awful discharge overhead like a vast 
 explosion, followed by a prolonged roll and crackling as if the very 
 earth were being curled up like a scroll, and then, following on it 
 like a torrent that had burst its dam, came the wild swoop and rush 
 of the rain. 
 
 ' Thank God !' said the tutor. 
 
 Spurway did not cry out as he had done at former peals, but his 
 hold on Herbert's hand relaxed, and he fell forward on the floor. 
 He had fainted. 
 
 When Herbert came out of chapel in the morning, the men were 
 standing about on the steps and in the court with grave faces, dis- 
 cussing the effects of the storm over-night. Awful accounts had 
 been brought in from the country by their gyps and bedmakers of 
 property destroyed, and injuries to buildings and cattle. 
 
 Three horses grazing on Midsummer Common had been killed, 
 houses and thatch had been set on fire, church-steeples had been 
 thrown down, lead and slates had been stripped from roofs, wind- 
 mills and ricks had been burnt down, and trees had been struck all 
 round the country. 
 
 Herbert went out in the morning sunshine to see the damage the 
 storm had wrought. The great King's gateway of Trinity was un- 
 injured, and the tower of St. Mary's was in its accustomed place. 
 A hideous grinning gargoyle had been removed from the tower of 
 a neighbouring church. 
 
 The Senate-house was in its place, too, and the roof had not been 
 torn off, and the gates were open, and a number of men were 
 crowding up the steps. Herbert pressed up too, at the tail-end of 
 the crowd. ' There must be a new list out,' he remarked to 
 himself, as he took his turn, step by step, in mounting that short 
 momentous flight of steps that has caused more throes of hope 
 and despair than any other flight of its size in the whole world. 
 
 ' What were the men looking at ?' Herbert asked himself im- 
 patiently, as he waited in the crowd for his place. He remembered 
 that he hadn't shaved : no more had a great many others on that 
 morning ; and, well, if he hadn't, they needn't stare so ! 
 
 The men coming down were all looking at him, as he waited cool 
 and indifferent in the crowd. Surely he hadn't forgot his collar ? 
 No, it was in the right place — he put up his hand to be sure. And 
 his tie ? (a very shabby one, dreadfully frayed at the edges). Yes ; 
 it was there right enough. What could the men be looking at ? 
 
 He got a little man in front of him, and looked over his shoulder 
 at the lists affixed to the Senate-house door. The letters all ran 
 together as he looked, or there was a mist before his eyes, or the 
 events of the preceding night had shaken his nerves ; but the onlj 
 
SPURWAY'S CONFESSION. 273 
 
 name he could see as he looked down the list was the one at the top. 
 His own — 'Flowers, Trinity.' 
 
 It was the list of the Classical Tripos. 
 
 There was a great thump on his shoulder, and a strong hand was 
 crushing his poor bruised fingers in a hearty grip, and a friendly 
 voice was ringing in his ears : 
 
 ' Well done, old man ! well done !' 
 
 Harvard really was scrunching up his fingers beyond all 
 reason, and the tears rose involuntarily to his eyes. Of course it 
 was the agony of his crushed fingers, and not the memory of that 
 green grave at Bideford, that made his eyes suddenly smart as 
 he came down the steps leaning on Harvard's friendly arm. 
 
 There was a crowd awaiting him at the bottom, and men pressing 
 round him to shake, as only undergraduates can shake, his poor 
 mangled hand. They nearly wrung it off, and his fingers were 
 tingling to the tips with the agony of his success as he passed 
 beneath the gate of Trinity. 
 
 In the court he met Mr. Routh, who shook him most affection- 
 ately by the hand — inflicting excruciating torture — and bore him 
 off to the Lodge to receive the congratulations of the Master. 
 
 How his foolish heart beat as he passed through the familiar hall 
 into the study beyond, where the great scholar was sitting among 
 his books ! There were other things beside musty folios in the 
 library of Trinity Lodge. There was an angel somewhere in a 
 white gown that brightened the dark old room with its presence. 
 
 Herbert blushed furiously as Mr. Routh led him proudly in. 
 Surely not at the purblind old Master, who wiped his spectacles, 
 and looked at him kindly out of his dim eyes. 
 
 'I am very glad,' he said, with that delightful simplicity that 
 characterized him. ' I am glad for your sake, and for the honour 
 you have brought the college. I congratulate you most heartily, 
 Mr. Flowers ! You have well won a distinction second to none I 
 know of. From a child I remember to have looked forward, as 
 the greatest honour that could happen to me on earth, to be a 
 Fellow of Trinity. I think you have done the same ; at any rate, 
 you have succeeded. I congratulate you most heartily, and I hope 
 the college will long retain you as one of its members !' 
 
 Lilian Howell congratulated the Senior Classic in a few formal 
 words. She gave Herbert, this time, her little cold hand — it didn't 
 occasion him the least agony — but he read in her clear, truthful 
 eyes the same cruel story. They said, as plain as eyes could speak : 'I 
 am dreadfully sorry for you ; I am more sorry for you now than ever!' 
 
 He met Spurway later in the day, coming blithely out of the 
 Lodge. He had a flower in his button-hole, and a cane in his hand, 
 and delicate kid gloves on his iron fingers. He didn't look scorched 
 or frizzled up by the lightning by auy means, and there was no 
 smell of fire on his Bond-Street-cut clothes, but a distinct odour of 
 ' Jockey Club.' The sun was shining, and the sky was perfectly 
 
 18 
 
274 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 blue and unclouded above the battlements of Trinity, Every trace 
 of the storm had disappeared off the face of Nature, and off the 
 clean-shaven and faultlessly-moustachioed face of the heir of 
 Bratton. 
 
 ' Oh, how d'ye do, Flowers ? glad to hear of your success. 
 Tbank you awfully for taking me in last night. I must have been 
 struck somehow in crossing the court ; I've no recollection what- 
 ever what happened after. They tell me the Dean brought me 
 home ; it was awfully good of him !' 
 
 And so ended Mr. Spurway's confession. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 ' Which of all moments of life brims over with glory supremest ? 
 Sweet, Senior Wrangler and Smith's Prizeman, to pass Double First V 
 
 On the first day of the May boat-races the lists of the Mathematical 
 Tripos would be out. 
 
 Very few men who had entered that great arena of University 
 distinction had slept that night. There was no thunderstorm to 
 keep them awake. Nature, in her most charming mood, had 
 spread the bluest of skies over the gray colleges, and watched with 
 her countless twinkling eyes the uneasy tossings of the honours 
 men. There were not many of them in bed after daylight, and 
 yet there were few who had the courage to press up the steps of 
 the Senate-house and hear the lists read out. 
 
 When it came to the last, the very last moment, the culminating 
 point of weeks of anxiety, doubt, and suspense, there were few who 
 could really bear to hear the brutal fact read out by cold, unsym- 
 pathetic voices. Those who had worked themselves into a fever of 
 excitement and suspense shut themselves in their rooms, and sent 
 their friends on the fateful errand. 
 
 Harvard had been working in his usual tremendous Transatlantic 
 way at his second Tripos, hoping to take a small first, he didn't 
 expect a very big one — s, senior optime, at any rate — back with 
 him to the States. 
 
 'I don't often funk anything,' he said to Herbert the night 
 before ; ' but I couldn't stand that reading of the lists. If I failed 
 I should show the white feather, and disgrace the Stars and 
 Stripes.' 
 
 He wasn't on the steps when the doors of the Senate-house were 
 thrown open, and the men were crushing in, before nine o'clock the 
 next morning. 
 
SUCCESS. 275 
 
 There was a dense crowd of University men beneath the gallery 
 from which the lists were read, and the galleries around were 
 crowded with sweet girl-undergraduates of Girton and Newn- 
 ham. 
 
 A sea of upturned faces greeted the appearance of the examiners 
 in the clear space left for them in the centre of the gallery. What 
 clean-shaven, amiable men they were as they smiled blandly down 
 from that serene height, calm and unmoved, upon the eager faces 
 below ! 
 
 ' Time ! time !' the men shouted ; but it was not time for full 
 thirty seconds, as the delightful examiner, with the lists rustling 
 in his hands, saw by his watch. There was a dull roar and a hush 
 as the hand of the clock travelled round to the fateful moment, 
 £nd the strained expression of gnawing anguish and suspense on 
 the upturned faces grew painfully intense. 
 
 The girls in the gallery were clutching at the rail, and some 
 sweet faces grew white, and some wan cheeks grew red, and every 
 eye was bright, and every lip trembled, as the first stroke of nine 
 fell upon their listening ears. 
 
 Oh, how many hearts were beating and knees trembling as in a 
 calm, clear, unmoved voice the examiner, nicely adjusting his 
 spectacles on his nose, read out the first names on the list ! — 
 
 ' Clark, St. John's, senior wrangler ; Flowers, Trinity, second ; 
 Harvard, Emmanuel, third.' 
 
 Such a deafening cheer greeted these announcements that the 
 examiner had to pause and wait for silence, and a Girton girl, who 
 could contain her impatience no longer, beat wildly on the rail, 
 and raised a beseeching hand to the clamorous crowd below. 
 
 Herbert heard no more. He was quite sure it was a mistake. 
 The lists were altogether wrong. He only saw the eager young 
 faces around him lengthen and whiten, and the lines deepen as 
 name after name was read out, and the name that each ear was 
 straining for, with, oh ! such an intensity of longing, was still 
 unspoken. A few faces brightened, and here and there a strong 
 man's lip quivered, and a mist rose before eyes unused to tears, 
 and blurred the agreeable countenance of the examiner in the 
 gallery above. 
 
 By-and-by, when the lists were read, a sheaf of papers, with the 
 names and places of the successful candidates for University 
 honours, was flung broadcast into the shouting mob below, and a 
 hundred hands were raised to catch them. Herbert secured his 
 prize and hurried off to apprise Harvard of his success — there 
 could be no mistake there, at any rate. 
 
 The steps of the Senate-house were so crowded, and there were 
 so many delays in getting out, that he had to wait and take his 
 turn. There was so much shaking of hands going on, and such 
 congratulatory slaps on the back, and such shouting and cheering 
 from the crowd of University men outside, that his progress was a 
 
 18—2 
 
276 A FELLOW OF TRINITY, 
 
 very slow one ; and Harvard all this time was enduring agonies of 
 suspense. 
 
 Place aux dames I Again he had to fall back ; the Newnham 
 and Girton girls were crowding down the gallery-stairs. Such a 
 bevy of blue-stockings, and, oh, such a flutter of timid hearts ! — 
 timid, alas ! no longer. Girton had secured a wrangler and a brace 
 of senior optimes, and Newnham had carried off seven honours. 
 
 It was quite easy to pick out the girls who had won from the 
 girls who had failed ; while these were smiling bravely, the 
 happy few were fluched and tearful — oh, such proud, happy 
 tears ! 
 
 It seemed such a mean thing to Herbert to tell Harvard he had 
 beaten him by a place. 
 
 • My dear old fellow, you have done splendidly !' he panted, 
 flying headlong into Harvard's room with the list in his hand ; 
 ' but there is some wretched mistake here : they have put me 
 before you.' 
 
 ' It's right enough, old man,' said Harvard, running his eye 
 rapidly down the list. ' You are in your right place, but I'm not 
 in mine. If I had come in at the end, it was as much as I could 
 expect. My tutor vowed I should have a third if I didn't give up 
 Barnwell and the night-school and stick to my work, but thank 
 God I didn't.' 
 
 ' You'll be a Fellow of your college, Jack,' said Herbert, 
 surveying him with undisguised admiration, and speaking out of 
 the simple fulness of hi3 heart. ' Emmanuel '11 never let you go 
 back ; she doesn't often get a double-first. You'll have to stay 
 here now ; I can't tell you how glad I am.' 
 
 ' If they offer me a Fellowship,' said Harvard modestly, ' I should 
 certainly accept it ; but my work here is finished. There's a wider 
 field than Barnwell waiting for me out there. There is not a 
 prouder distinction in the whole world that I could take back to 
 dear old Cambridge than to be a Fellow of Emmanuel, except, 
 indeed, to be the best half-back in the 'Varsity.' 
 
 There was a great grasping of hands when Herbert got back to 
 Trinity ; he could bear it better now. He had got accustomed to 
 success. Men forgot his highlows and his frayed jacket ; they had 
 ceased even to observe the baggy knees of his trousers as they 
 congratulated him on the honour and distinction he had won. 
 Grave old senior Fellows to whom he had looked up with nothing 
 short of reverence during his undergraduate days, came up and 
 shook hands with him in Hall, and said the nicest things in their 
 grave, courtly manner, with the whole table looking on. 
 
 Everybody congratulated him with smiling lips, but nobody was 
 very much moved by his success. Not an eye had grown dim, not 
 a lip had quivered, in all these formal congratulations, and not 
 a single kind voice had faltered a broken ' God bless you !' except 
 —except, indeed, his bedmaker's. 
 
SUCCESS. 277 
 
 Her frouzy old bonnet was awry, and her broom was in ber 
 hand, as she stood in the early morning, in the centre of a knot of 
 bedmakers and brooms, in the Great Court, flaunting Herbert's 
 success over the head of a virago who waited upon a duke. 
 
 ' My gentleman's a-beat all yourn holler !' she was saying 
 proudly. ' Lords and dooks, indeed ! There are plenty of they 
 sort about here, but when it comes to learnin' they can't hold a 
 candle to him ! See what he's a-gone through before you talks of 
 yer lords and dooks — took two Tripuses an' lost his dear mar all in 
 a year, and not a single soul in the whole world left, when he comes 
 out first, to say, " God bless him !" ' 
 
 The bedmaker shouldered her broom, and blew her nose, as she 
 went her way, with such emphasis that it could be heard the other 
 end of the court. 
 
 Everybody had friends coming up to the May boat-races or the 
 degrees. There never had been such a gay May Week. The 
 Great Court was crowded all day with men surrounded by the 
 friends to whom they were expounding the glories and greatness of 
 their college. The chapel was full of visitors ; the hall was 
 thronged with fluttering female forms, hovering round the tables, 
 sitting in the Master's grand chair, admiring the portraits on the 
 walls, going into ecstasies over the lovely Reynolds bequeathed by 
 the Duchess of Gloucester. Herbert could see them from his 
 window going in and coming out. It seemed to him in his loneliness 
 that everybody had people coming up this May Yv 7 eek but himself. 
 
 The Lodge was full of visitors, and he recognised among them 
 in the stalls in chapel Lady Millicent and Muriel Spurway. He 
 took his cap off gravely to her as he came out, but her ladyship 
 didn't happen to look his way. She had come up to see the heir 
 of Bratton take his degree, a Poll degree, and near the bottom of 
 the list ; but it had been proclaimed in print in the Bideford 
 Chronicle with a suitable flourish of trumpets. 
 
 He quite understood Lady Millicent's attitude, and he could not 
 blame her for it. Was not Julie still occupying his mother's 
 cottage at Bideford 1 It was Lucy's wish. She had been too weak 
 to enter into any explanation, but she had wished it, and her wish 
 was law ; and he remembered, as Lady Millicent swept by, the 
 construction she had doubtless put upon it. 
 
 The next morning Harvard, in his impetuous way, burst into his 
 room. 
 
 ' I say, old man, the heiress is coming down to see you take your 
 degree 1 I do believe she is keen on you.' 
 
 Herbert didn't blush this time, but he turned a shade pale. ' I 
 thought it was you,' he was going to say, but he checked himself 
 in time. 
 
 ' She is very fond of Cambridge,' he said quietly ; ' she loves it 
 for Geraint's sake.' 
 
 The May races were now over — Herbert had no longer any 
 
278 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 interest in them — and the procession of the flower-crowned boats 
 had attracted every soul in Cambridge to the banks of the Cam. 
 The leafy, leafy Backs, the beautiful bridges, the shady Fellows' 
 gardens, the sweeping meadows, were crowded with the youth and 
 beauty, not of Cambridge only, but of every county in England. 
 The boats that had come down the river with long sweeping 
 strokes ' eased ' as they passed the crowded banks, and drifted in 
 calm majesty to their place, the dark-blue of Second Trinity taking 
 the lead, followed by the scarlet of Lady Margaret, the black and 
 white of Trinity Hall, the red of Jesus. 
 
 Herbert waited on the bridge of King's while the eights rowed 
 past, with their waving flags and their floral crowns, and returned 
 in order, lying side by side in line across the river. He remembered 
 as he stood there, how Geraint and he had pulled together in that first 
 boat, where the men, Spurway among them, were sitting modestly 
 down, while every man in every boat along the line, lifting their 
 oars in the air, cheered them with all the generous fervour of lusty 
 undergraduate lungs. And in the midst of the cheering the band 
 struck up, ' For he's a jolly good fellow !' and a thousand voices 
 joined in the hearty chorus. 
 
 Herbert could stand it no longer. The memory of that sad day 
 when the shouts of the crowd were in his ears, and that noble face 
 was whitening on his knee, rose up before him, and he turned away 
 from the sight, and strode moodily over the fields to Granfr- 
 chester. 
 
 The shouts of the crowd were still ringing in bis ears as he swung 
 open the gate of the little green churchyard : 
 
 ' For he's a jolly good fellow !' 
 
 He repeated it to himself involuntarily as he walked among the 
 graves, pushing back the trailing boughs of briar-roses and haw- 
 thorn that swung across the path. It was a wild unkempt church- 
 yard, and the grave he sought was in the older portion, beneath 
 the shadow of the chancel, and it was already overgrown with 
 weeds and flowers. 
 
 As he stood beside it, repeating the words that were ringing in 
 his ears, and telling the story of his loneliness to the quiet sleeper 
 beneath, a figure emerged from the surrounding greenery. He 
 heard the rustle of a woman's dress across the grass and he looked 
 up. It was Mary Barclay. 
 
 He started involuntarily when he saw her. His nerves were un- 
 strung by the events of the last few days. 
 
 'I am so glad to meet you here,' she said, reaching out her hand 
 to him across Geraint's grave. ' I have wanted so much to con- 
 gratulate you, Mr. Flowers. Surely there could not be a more 
 fitting place.' 
 
 Herbert bowed his head gravely. Hers were the first woman's 
 lips that had trembled when they uttered theie formal congratula- 
 tions. 
 
SUCCESS. 279 
 
 * I am so glad,' she went on hurriedly, 'for your sake, and for his. 
 In his name, as well as my own, I congratulate you most sincerely. 
 Did I not tell you that there was a great future before you — that 
 you would be a Fellow of Trinity ? Oh, how much more you may 
 be rests with yourself. You have borne your poverty so nobly, 
 that wealth and distinction will not spoil you.' 
 
 ' Wealth ?' he repeated with a smile. ' The wealth of a Fellow 
 is never very great, and it may be years before I can be elected to 
 a Fellowship. I shall have to earn my living by taking pupils.' 
 
 1 Not necessarily,' she said, still in that hurried tone that was un- 
 usual to her. 
 
 He looked across the grave at her in some surprise ; she was 
 twisting her ungloved hands together nervously, and as he caught 
 the gleam of the diamonds on her fingers, he suddenly recalled that 
 strange scene in Marylebone, and remembered what strong, earnest 
 hands they were. Surely there must be some hidden meaning in 
 her words ? 
 
 ■ Quite necessarily,' he answered gravely. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Flowers, there are other things in the world beside 
 college Fellowships worth winning ! Surely that is but a stepping- 
 stone to higher things ? Wealth, with the power and influence it 
 brings ; position, fame, usefulness, love— are not these worth win- 
 ning ?' 
 
 How beautiful she was, as she stood there with the red sunset 
 light on her pale face and her noble figure, bike Providence with her 
 hands full of gifts, reaching them out to him across Geraint's grave ! 
 He smiled sadly. 
 
 ' To some men,' he said slowly, and with a touch of bitterness in 
 the tone, ' they represent the highest good ; but to me,' and he 
 looked back across the Grantchester meadows to the gray towers 
 of Cambridge in the distance, ' my place is here.' 
 
 ' And why not to you ?' she said ; her lip quivered as she spoke, 
 and her pale cheeks flushed. ' They were his once,' and she looked 
 down at the mound at her feet ; 'and he loved you — and— and for 
 his sake, and the love you bore him, they are yours, if you will 
 accept them, Mr. Flowers, at the hand of a woman.' 
 
 Herbert could not affect to misunderstand her ; but his face 
 hardened, and instead of blushing in his usual absurd fashion, he 
 turned white to the lips, but he could find no words to answer 
 her. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Flowers, I am doing a shameful thing ; but I am sure 
 that he would have it so. How am I to speak more plainly ? I 
 cannot find the words.' 
 
 Herbert pitied her from his heart, but he could not help her out 
 with a single word, and his white face was set like a flint, while 
 Mary Barclay was flushed and tearful. 
 
 The choir were practising in the low village church, and _ the 
 voices of the singers, as they floated out into the summer night, 
 
28o A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 broke the silence, and the wood-pigeons were cooing in the elm- 
 trees above, and a sad low breeze of evening swept through the 
 yard, and shook the petals of the briar-roses down upon the graves. 
 Herbert remembered all these sights and sounds long after, but he 
 dared not look upon the pleading face of the woman by his side. 
 A few months ago it would have been different ; but now there 
 was no one but himself, and his cup was already full to the brim. 
 
 She was weeping softly, and her tears were falling down on 
 Geraint's grave. He offered her his arm, and he led her through 
 the narrow moss-grown path among the lichen-covered tombs until 
 she recovered herself. 
 
 ' All that I have would have been his,' she said presently in a 
 broken voice, clinging to his arm with her warm tremulous fingers ; 
 ' will you fill his place, Mr. Flowers ?' 
 
 How could he answer her ? 
 
 ' I could never fill his place.' he said sadly, bending over her. 
 ' He was so brave, and generous, and noble ; and I — I am only a 
 poor scholar ; and I have chosen my lonely life.' 
 
 ' And your choice is irrevocable r she said softly ; and her hand 
 trembled on his arm. 
 
 ' It is quite irrevocable,' he answered gravely. 
 
 The wind swept through the churchyard and died sighing away 
 among the graves ; the wood-pigeons were silent, and the voices of 
 the choir rose in a sad, plaintive chant ; the dusk was f ailing over 
 the graves and the dimly-lighted church, as Herbert led Mary 
 Barclay to the carriage that was waiting for her at the gate. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVL 
 
 NEMESIS. 
 
 1 1 hear a chirp of birds ; I see 
 A light-blue lane of early dawn. 
 
 An old-fashioned June morning fitly ushered in the Day of 
 Degrees. ' Blue above lane and wall ;' blue over the chapel of 
 King's ; blue over the hall of Trinity ; blue over the pinnacled 
 tower of St. Mary's ; blue, deeply blue, over the storied urns of 
 the Senate-house, and the green of the cloistered courts, and the 
 bridges, and the drooping picturesque willows, and the winding river 
 that caught and reflected back the blue of the sky. 
 
 Herbert had to call upon the Dean in the morning of the blue 
 day to settle some preliminaries, and the Dean looked him over 
 with a critical eye before he presented himself in the Senate-house. 
 A great many critical eyes would look him over by-and-by, when 
 he represented the highest distinction won by Trinity. 
 
NEMESIS. 28 r 
 
 A suowy B.A. hood covered his shabby gown, and spotless bands 
 coucealed his frayed linen. His trousers were decidedly baggy and 
 shiny at the knees — the Dean didn't object to that — and, oh, his 
 cap was that limp and disreputable at the corners that the credit of 
 Trinity was at stake ! 
 
 It was full late to go in quest of a new one, and the Dean went 
 into an inner room and brought out one of his own ; not by any 
 means a new one, but straight and severe, with the corners intact, 
 and the tassel entire and depending in scholarly fashion over his 
 nose. 
 
 ' If you will wear this, Mr. Flowers, it is more respectable than 
 your own, and I am sure you will not mind accepting it.' 
 
 ' I will wear it with the greatest pride and pleasure,' said 
 Herbert ; ' I shall take it as a good omen.' 
 
 The floor of the Senate-house was crowded ; but Herbert looked 
 in vain for any kind face among the well-dressed crowd that would 
 brighten at his great success. He was tired already of being com- 
 plimented and stared at. He would have exchanged all his honours 
 with the man who took the lowest place, and had his proud, happy 
 people and the girl he loved, there in the front row, smiling upon 
 him. He recalled his first speech-day at the old school, with the 
 little mother waving her pocket-handkerchief, as he rose from his 
 knees a Bachelor of Arts, amid the deafening cheers of the under- 
 graduates in the gallery. 
 
 The Vice-Chancellor shook hands with him, and other august 
 personages in scarlet robes congratulated him on his great success. 
 Lilian Howell was there, with the people of her betrothed, in the 
 front row ; but she only vouchsafed him one look as he rose, grave 
 and deeply moved, from his knees, with the solemn words of the 
 Vice- Chancellor ringing in his ears : ' In nomine Patris et Filii et 
 Spiritus SanctV And that look said plainer than any words, ' I am 
 more sorry for you than ever ! ; 
 
 The blue June day had worn itself out, and the courts were de- 
 serted, and Herbert was walking alone after Hall in the Backs. 
 The colours of the bright day were deepening, and the shadows 
 lengthening, as it drew to its close, and the walls of the old colleges 
 were glowing redder and yellower as the sun went down. But 
 Herbert saw none of these. He was eating the Dead Sea fruit he 
 had toiled so hard to win. 
 
 Success with none to share it was less enviable than failure with 
 kind hands to soften it. He had never felt his desolation so com- 
 pletely as he felt it to-night, when Fortune had poured her best 
 gifts into his lap, and he had turned away from her with the same 
 cry on his lips as the Preacher of old : ' vanitas vanitatum V 
 
 Had he done well, he asked himself, in rejecting the love and 
 sympathy that Mary Barclay had offered him ? If it had not been 
 bo heavily weighted with that intolerable burden of wealth, unto 
 which he certainly was not born, he might have hesitated ; but as it 
 
282 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 was, he had no alternative. He had borne the galling chain of 
 poverty so long, and grown so accustomed to it, that he would not 
 barter it for the golden fetters of wealth. Besides, had it even been 
 possible for the sake of others, it had come too late ! 
 
 Herbert stood on the bridge of Trinity, looking gloomily down 
 into the dark water ; he did not care to go back to his rooms, for 
 there was a great party at the Lodge, and the court was crowded 
 ■with people arriving. He was in no mood for festivities, least of 
 all for festivities beneath the roof of Trinity Lodge. It was the 
 first occasion since the death of the Master's wife ; and the engage- 
 ment of the Master's niece had been announced, and, doubtless, she 
 was receiving all the world's congratulations. 
 
 As he stood there, with the red sun sinking behind the trees, and 
 flecking the dark water with splashes of crimson light, he heard his 
 name spoken by an unfamiliar voice ; and he looked hurriedly up, 
 and Julie stood before him. 
 
 Her face was soiled and worn no longer, and her fringe was in 
 its accustomed place, and she was showily dressed ; but there was 
 a look in her dark eyes that Herbert had never seen there 
 before. 
 
 She wore a short veil over the fringe, and the rouge, and the 
 little kiss-me-quick curls ; but beneath it her eyes, always brilliant 
 and sparkling, shone like living coals ; and Herbert noticed that her 
 thin red lips, as she spoke, twitched painfully. 
 
 ' You here ? Oh, Julie !' 
 
 He was thinking of Lilian Howell, and the dismay that her 
 presence at this moment would cause. 
 
 ' And why not ? I have " wait a minit," and my time has come. 
 I have wait until he has taken his degree ; I have not trouble him 
 at all ; I have not disturb his mind. I have let him win his 
 honour — and I am come to share it !' 
 
 The flame in her dark eyes leaped up into a blaze as she spoke ; 
 and Herbert felt his heart sink within him. 
 
 Oh, Lilian, Lilian ! 
 
 ' To share it ? What do you mean, Julie ? Do you know his 
 mother and his sister are here ?' he asked her sternly. 
 
 She gave a low laugh, and her thin scarlet lips curled themselves 
 scornfully ; and there was a gleam of unmistakable triumph in her 
 eyes. 
 
 ' I know they are here, and that is why I have come. I wish to 
 share the honour, the distinction, with them. I have wait long for 
 this minit !' 
 
 ' Oh, Julie, you are mad !' he said. ' You cannot possibly gc 
 there. You do not know all. You must not be seen here — indeed 
 you must not. I will see Spurway, and tell him anything you 
 wish ; but you must go away at once. If the Proctors see you 
 here, yon will be removed. Oh, you do not know what risks yoc 
 are running by being here, after being once warned !' 
 
 
NEMESIS. 283 
 
 He was terribly in earnest. If this woman wgre caught here, in 
 her excited state, what scandal and confusion it would cause ! 
 
 1 1 defy your Proctors ! I defy your Spinning-house !' she 
 exclaimed, turning quite livid with passion. ' They have threaten to 
 take me there once ; they have insult me, and I have not complain. I 
 have wait a minit. They will not threaten me now. I shall see 
 them, maybe at the Lodge, and tell them I have come to dinner !' 
 
 'But, Julie, surely you are not going there? There is a party 
 to-night ; wait, at any rate, until the morning.' 
 
 He hardly knew what he said, he was so anxious to detain her 
 and gain time. 
 
 ' That is why I am going to-night,' she said, with a gleam of 
 triumph in her eyes. ' He is there, with his dainty miss and her 
 frisnds, and my lady, and I am going before them all — to claim 
 my husband.' 
 
 ' Your husband !' Herbert repeated faintly, and hie own voice 
 sounded very far away in his ears. 
 
 4 My husband — my lawful husband !' she repeated in a tone of 
 triumph, and her dark eyes glittered like baleful lightning. ' You 
 did not think I was so poor a fool as to be taken in with a sham 
 marriage !' she said scornfully. ' I had got a license before I meet 
 him in Cambridge, and Mr. Grinley's friend, who was in orders, 
 though he did not know it, perform the ceremony. He thought to 
 ruin a poor girl with a sham marriage, and cast her off like an old 
 shoe when he was tired of her ; but he reckoned without Julie !' 
 and she gave a little shrug of her expressive shoulders. 
 
 ' Have you any proof of this ?' Herbert asked sternly. He was 
 thinking of Lilian, and how to spare her this intolerable shame and 
 agony. 
 
 • On yes, I have proof and witnesses. It was registered here, 
 and there is Mr. Grinley and the clergyman.' 
 
 Herbert felt the bridge was going round with him, and the river 
 and the Backs and Trinity library were getting mixed up. 
 
 ' Oh, spare her to-night !' he said when he could say anything. 
 1 Let — let this awful revelation wait till to-morrow. She is so 
 innocent and happy, and it would kill her. Oh, Jubie, if you have 
 any mercy, wait till to-morrow !' 
 
 ' If I have any mercy !' she repeated with a low cruel laugh that 
 went shuddering away down the avenue among the trees. ' What 
 mercy would she show me ? No, Herbert Flowers, I have wait for 
 this minit all my life !' 
 
 She left him standing there powerless to detain her, with an in- 
 flexible purpose in her shining eyes. He watched this terrible 
 Nemesis cross the bridge and pass beneath the archway of Neville's 
 Court, and when he turned again to look at the river the flame of 
 the sunset had died out, but the dark waters were still flecked with 
 great drops of blood. 
 
 ' Oh, Lilian, Lilian !' 
 
284 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 He hadn't the heart to go back to his rooms until it was quite 
 dark. He stayed out till the college-gates on the river side were 
 closed for the night, and he went round by the road and came in by 
 the great gate of Trinity, which was thrown wide open, and the 
 company from the Lodge, that he had left going in, were pouring 
 out and driving away in ftys and hired carriages. There was an un- 
 usual amount of confusion, as if the party had broken up hastily 
 before its time, and cabs and hansoms were at a premium. 
 
 As Herbert crossed the Court he notieed the men standing about 
 in groups. The college servants and cooks, in their white caps, 
 contrary to custom, were gathered in knots, and a crowd hung 
 round the entrance to Neville's Court. He remembered, with a 
 horrible misgiving at his heart, that Spurway's rooms were there, 
 and in a moment it dawned upon him that Julie was making a 
 scene. 
 
 He hurried past the groups to his own staircase ; he could not 
 bear to ask a question. He sat down in the dark with his face in 
 his hands, thinking of the misery that had fallen on the woman he 
 loved. He never knew how long he had sat there, but he was 
 roused suddenly by a knock at his door, and Mr. Routh entered. 
 
 ' Are you here, Flowers ?' he asked hurriedly, standing in the 
 doorway, and peering into the darkened room. 
 
 ' Yes, sir, I am here ; has anything happened ?' 
 
 'What ! have you not heard ?' 
 
 'No, indeed, I have heard nothing. I have just come in.' 
 
 * Oh, how can I tell you ?' the tutor answered, his voice sinking 
 to a tone of reluctant horror. ' There has been an awful scene 
 here with — with that woman, and — and Spurway has blown his 
 brains out !' 
 
 1 Good heavens !' exclaimed Herbert, and he sank back in his 
 chair. 
 
 ' It appears that woman had some claim upon him, and she en- 
 forced it at an awkward moment. She broke in, indeed, upon the 
 company assembled at the Lodge and demanded to e&e her husband. 
 The servants couldn't get her away, and the poo? fellow left the 
 place with her, and she followed him to his rooms. What happened 
 there God only knows, but soon after she was screaming like a mad 
 woman for help, and when help came it was too late !' 
 
 ' And Miss Howell ?' said Herbert. 
 
 How his voice shook 1 he scarcely recognised it for his own. 
 
 ' Oh, Miss Howell ; she is behaving like an angel ! She is com- 
 forting the poor, frenzied mother as if she were her daughter 
 indeed.' 
 
 ' When did this happen ?' Herbert asked. 
 
 ' Not an hour ago. I have just come from there : the scene is 
 too awful to think upon ; but we can't get the wretched woman 
 who has caused all this trouble out of the room. She claims her 
 right to stay with him, and nothing but force will move her.' 
 
NEMESIS. 285 
 
 * And Spurway ?' 
 
 ' Oh, he is quite dead, and she will not leave the body ! but it is 
 impossible for her to remain. Do you think you could have any 
 influence with her ? Will you come over and try to get her 
 quietly away ?' 
 
 Herbert went over reluctantly enough ; but for the sake of 
 Lilian Howell he undertook the thankless, miserable errand. 
 
 The door of the room was open, and a number of men, the Dean 
 among them, were bending over a woman who was crouching on 
 the floor, and vainly trying to raise her. On a couch by her side, a 
 sheet covered, but not concealed, the rigid outline of the figure 
 \hat lay beneath. There was blood on the sheet, and on the floor, 
 and on the woman's dress, and her hand ; and she sat silent and 
 still, and deaf to all entreaties to move. 
 
 Her face was deadly white, and so contorted by a look of awful 
 terror as to be scarcely recognisable for Julie. 
 
 She sat motionless beside the couch, her dark eyes fixed with a 
 look of unutterable horror at the dreary outline of the figure 
 Deneath the sheet ; but she paid no heed to the entreaties of the 
 men about her to leave the awful spot. 
 
 Herbert stood for a moment on the threshold paralyzed by the 
 strange sight ; then he stepped firmly into the room, and, pressing 
 through the crowd, took the girl by the arm and raised her from 
 her sitting position in spite of herself. 
 
 ' Come away, Julie ; come away V he said sternly. ' This is no 
 place for you. You have done mischief enough already !' 
 
 The woman clung to his arm in a panic of abject fear. 
 
 ' It was he himself who did it, not me. Oh no, indeed it was 
 not me. I thought he only threatened to frighten me, and I 
 laughed at him, and told him he was too much a coward to do it, 
 and oh, mon Dieu ! he did it on the moment, and he fell at my feet 
 there, and his blood is all over me !' 
 
 She shuddered as she spoke, and drew her dress away from the 
 contact with a pool of blood on the floor. Her face was ghastly 
 white beneath the rouge, and her scarlet lips were quite livid. 
 
 ' Come away,' said Herbert sternly, not heeding her wild, inco- 
 herent talk, and drawing her almost roughly with his inexorable 
 hand through the crowd ; ' come away ; I tell you this is no place 
 for you !' 
 
 She left the room on his arm cowed like a beaten dog. He drew 
 her silently through the court, and beneath the gate, and hurried 
 her through the dusky street. He was thankful for the darkness 
 that covered her ; he was thankful to have her there on his arm, 
 and to drag her with his swift, remorseless steps farther and 
 farther away from that pure soul whose happiness she had blighted. 
 
 He did not speak once to her all the way, but she babbled on ex- 
 cusing herself, and bewailing the awful act to which she had 
 driven the unhappy man, in incoherent words, 
 
286 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 1 He was mad ; he was wild with passion !' she explained in her 
 incoherent way. ' They called him down into a room, away from 
 the company — they would not let me go in ; and while I talked to 
 him my lady came in with her proud face and her scornful eyes, 
 and I up and told her I was as good as she now ; that I had wait a 
 minit — that I should be my Lady Spurway myself some day ; and 
 — and — he swore at me, and told me to hold my tongue, and took 
 me out of the house to his rooms — and I showed him the papers, 
 and told him how Mr. Grinley had stood my friend, and brought a 
 real parson, and not a sham one ; and he swore a great oath, and 
 cursed Mr. Grinley, and cursed me, and vowed if I did not give up 
 my claim upon him he would shoot himself. He offered to buy me 
 off ! — me, who had waited so long ! Ah, he did not know Julie ! I 
 laughed at him ; I knew he was a coward, and — oh, mon Dieu ! he 
 took me at my word — and he fired I' 
 
 The woman was shuddering in every limb when Herbert took 
 her into the Bull Hotel. He gave her into the hands of the 
 chambermaid ; and then he remembered with what fidelity and 
 tenderness she had watched beside the dying-bed of his mother, 
 and he explained to the woman that she had had a terrible shock, 
 and begged her to look after her. 
 
 Herbert was so shaken by the events of the week that, having 
 nowhere else in particular to go to, he went up to town, and spent 
 the first few weeks of the long vacation with Jayne at the Camber- 
 well Mission. Lady Millicent, when the inquest was over, had 
 taken the body of her son back to Bratton, where it was interred 
 with much funereal pomp, in the stately tomb of his ancestors at 
 Bideford. An uninvited mourner, in the deepest of weeds, had 
 been present at the funeral, and after the ceremony had come 
 up to the house, by the front door, and made her claim for recogni- 
 tion by the family as the legally wedded wife of the late heir of 
 Bratton. It was a stormy interview, in spite of the solemnity of 
 the occasion, and whatever compromises were made — and the deeply 
 beweeded mourner went away smiling behind her veil — Julie 
 never again darkened the doors of Bratton Court. 
 
 Jayne had been ordained to a curacy in the neighbourhood of 
 Camberwell, and he still kept on his rooms and his work at the 
 mission. Harvard had also come up, to get his hand in, as hi 
 termed it, to home mission work on an extensive scale, before he 
 returned to the States. 
 
 It did Herbert good hammering about the narrow streets an<8 
 markets of Camberwell with these kindred souls. The atmosphere, 
 close and heated as it was in the breathless July weather, was 
 purer and clearer than the atmosphere he had left behind at Trinity, 
 tainted by that horrible tragedy. Nobody in Camberwell was very 
 much surprised at the result. No good could by any possibility 
 have come of such a shameful mesalliance. 
 
NEMESIS. 287 
 
 1 Madam Jezebel '11 have her turn yet,' said Harvard, with his 
 accustomed metaphor, ' or there are no snakes !' 
 
 Herbert learnt a great deal in those few weeks at the mission. 
 He learnt that this strange race that he worked among, that were 
 steeped to the lips in wretchedness and ignorance, had very true 
 and warm human hearts, and had exactly the same feelings as him- 
 self. He found out very soon that with a little sympathy and a 
 little help they would be enabled to live very true and honest 
 artisan lives, and lift their heads above the low clouded atmosphere 
 of poverty and distress. 
 
 ' If I were staying here,' said Harvard one day, emerging from a 
 frouzy court, where a number of sturdy young fellows were loung- 
 ing about out of work, ' I should start a barrow-mission.' 
 
 ' A barrow-mission ?' Jayne repeated ; he had always got his 
 eyes and his ears open for suggestions. 
 
 ' Yes,' said Harvard, ' I would let out barrows in any number to 
 these fellows ; and I would set them up with a small loan or gift, 
 enough to stock them, and put them in the way of independence, 
 at any rate.' 
 
 ' They would never repay the loan,' said Herbert moodily — he 
 hadn't much faith in the people ; the men of Trinity hadn't made 
 the acquaintance of the masses until the mission was started. All 
 honour to the mission ! — ' They would get drunk the first day upon 
 the proceeds, and most likely sell the barrows.' 
 
 ' No, no, no !' Jayne interrupted quite excitedly. ' They would 
 do nothing of the kind. Wait until you have lived among the 
 people so long as I have, Flowers, and seen them in their own homes, 
 before you make such a cruel — forgive me for saying so — such an 
 unjust assertion. I will give you an instance in my own experience. 
 Not long ago I was walking in a very crowded thoroughfare with a 
 friend, a Trinity man, who had once been a curate about here, but 
 had left the parish for some years, and, being in town, was staying 
 with me a few days at the mission. While we were talking, a cart 
 drove up, and a man, well dressed and with a very cheerful face, 
 jumped out and rushed up to my friend, and began shaking him 
 wildly by the hand. 
 
 ' " I don't remember you," said my friend, still shaking him by 
 the hand. 
 
 ' " Oh yes, you do, sir," said the other. " I'm Jem Smith, that 
 you helped with the loan of five shillings to buy a sack of potatoes 
 with when I was starving and broke down. I got a barrow and 
 sold them all out in the day, and brought you back the money at 
 night ; but you wouldn't take it, sir — no, that you wouldn't. You 
 sent me back to buy some more, and I brought it back night after 
 night till I didn't want it no longer, and then you lent it to another 
 man. That five shillings of yours, sir, was the luckiest five shil- 
 lings I ever had in my life. I've got three shops now, and a horse 
 and cart " (and a very fine horse and cart it was, too), " and a good 
 
288 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 home for the missis and the children ; and we've all got to thank 
 you for it. Not remember me, sir ! Why, I'd know you among a 
 thousand ! I humbly thank you again, sir, and — God bless you !" 
 
 ' My friend was very much moved, but he only said, " God bless 
 you, Jem Smith !" and wrung his hand. The people round stared 
 at us, for we all had tears in our eyes, and were blowing our nose3 
 like great schoolboys. Not trust the people indeed !' 
 
 Jayne made a note of Harvard's suggestion. He made many 
 notes of useful schemes, which a little bird carried to a certain 
 house in a West-End park, which Herbert was surprised to hear 
 was being dismantled. Mary Barclay was going abroad, and the 
 great house was to be let. But the work was to go on the same 
 during her absence in the hands of this wise almoner of her bounty. 
 As many public-houses as he could get the lease of, Jayne had 
 already shut up and turned into coffee-palaces. But Mary Bar- 
 clay's philanthropy did not end in coffee and buns. 
 
 Passing through the rooms of an infirmary in the neighbourhood 
 of the mission, Jayne pointed out to Herbert a new ward, with the 
 name recently painted up in bright red letters above the door, ' The 
 Ruby Ward.' 
 
 As they walked homeward, Jayne told him the touching story 
 connected with it. 
 
 * You remember that packet, Flowers, you sent up to be given to 
 the strange nurse who fainted after the operation that night when 
 Miss Barclay was there ?' 
 
 1 Yes,' said Herbert. ' The packet was hers ; it had been en- 
 trusted to me.' 
 
 ' Well, the day after I sent it to the Home where she belonged ; 
 it was brought back to me with a note from Sister Ursula, the 
 name by which she was known. The Sister who brought it told 
 me that she had been removed, by her own wish, to a Home in the 
 East-End, where the work was heavier and much more trying. 
 The packet contained, as you doubtless know, some valuable 
 jewels, and the note begged that they might be sold for some 
 charitable purpose connected with the Trinity Mission. I could 
 not go through London selling rubies, so I packed them up with 
 the letter, and sent them to Miss Barclay.' 
 
 ' To Mary Barclay !' Herbert interrupted. ' Oh, Jayne, you 
 don't know who this woman was ?' 
 
 'No, my dear fellow ; how should I?' And then he saw a strange 
 look in Herbert's face. • You don't — really — mean ' he stam- 
 mered, the light beginning to dawn upon him. 
 
 ' I do indeed. She was the woman that you prayed that Geraint 
 should be prevented from marrying.' 
 
 ' God bless me !' said Jayne simply ; ' and did Miss Barclay 
 know it V 
 
 ' She will never know it,' said Herbert, ' unless you tell her. But 
 what did she do about the rubies ?' 
 
NEMESIS. 289 
 
 ' She kept them herself, and sent me five hundred pounds for 
 them. With this we have built a ward in the infirmary for sick 
 children — it was a woman's gift, remember — and we have called it 
 " The Euby Ward." ' 
 
 Some days after this Herbert happened, while walking aimlessly 
 in the West-End on a broiling afternoon, to step into the auction 
 rooms of Messrs. Christie, Manson and Woods, merely, indeed, to 
 get out of the sun, when in walking through their great galleries 
 his eye rested on a little Chelsea figure that he thought he had seen 
 before. 
 
 It was only a little brown-eyed Chelsea Cupid. There are 
 thousands of others like it in the world, but Herbert stopped 
 before it as if there were no other, and greeted it as if it were an 
 old acquaintance. He could not mistake it, as it stood there in the 
 sunlight alone — its fellow was on his mantelpiece at Trinity. And 
 then, when he looked round upon all the costly china and pictures 
 and furniture that crowded these great rooms, he suddenly remem- 
 bered where he had seen it all last, and the pale face of its fair 
 owner rose up before him — not as he had seen it proudly among 
 these, but as he last saw it in the sunset-light across G-eraint's grave. 
 
 The Rubens from the great dining-room, the Guidos, the Van 
 Dycks, were looking down upon him from their great gilded frames 
 as they had looked at him on that first day when his iron heels 
 made such a dreadful noise on the marble floor. 
 
 The door of the office was open, and a clerk was standing there 
 disengaged, and Herbert went up to the counter and asked for a 
 catalogue. 
 
 ' I don't know whether I am justified in asking the question,' he 
 said modestly, ' but would you mind telling me the name of the 
 lady to whom these things belong ?' 
 
 ' I don't think it is any secret,' the clerk replied, ' though the 
 name does not appear on the catalogue. They are the property of 
 a Miss Barclay, and are sold for some charitable purpose.' 
 
 Jayne knew all about it, of course. The charitable object had 
 been his own pet project. Mary Barclay was selling the luxurious 
 lares etpenates of her youth for the establishment and endowment 
 of an industrial Home at the East-End. 
 
 ' That woman's about hit the right nail on the head,' said 
 Harvard approvingly, when he heard the story ; ' she's giving the 
 people a chance of helping themselves, any way. If she'd only get 
 rid of that cussed pile, I'd marry her myself !' 
 
 ' Now, really, would you, Jack ?' said Tayne, his kind old face 
 beaming across the teapot, as he filled Harvard's cup to the brim. 
 1 1 don't think you'll ha- e very long to wait.' 
 
 19 
 
2Q0 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIL 
 
 A FELLOW OP TRINITY. 
 
 * Oh, ye wise ! we arise out of failures, dreams, disasters ; 
 We arise to be your masters. ' 
 
 Herbert was back again at Trinity. He wore a long B.A. gown 
 now, with ribbons on it, that he made no attempt to hide, and a 
 fur hood over his surplice, and sat in great dignity in the Bachelors' 
 seats in chapel, and at the Fellows' table in Hall. 
 
 He was a Fellow of Trinity ! 
 
 He sat at the high table now, and the grave portraits of the 
 founders and the illustrious dead looked down upon him approv- 
 ingly. 
 
 The ardours, the sorrows, the struggles of the race, were all over ; 
 only the brilliant achievement remained. The great cloud of wit- 
 nesses that looked down from those old rafters overhead upon 
 those who feasted there had never approved a more nobly earned 
 success in the rich intellectual history of the past of Trinity. 
 
 He wore his honours as he had worn his misfortunes, with be- 
 coming modesty, and was warmly welcomed by the grave, scholarly 
 old Fellows who sat round the great horseshoe table in the Combi- 
 nation Room. 
 
 Perhaps he never quite realized until he sat there, on that first 
 night of his Fellowship after Hall, mute and wondering, enjoying 
 the walnuts and the wine — and all that the walnuts and the wine 
 round that horseshoe table represented of scholarly and philo- 
 sophical learning and culture — how great had been his success ! 
 
 He had received the appointment of lecturer on the classical 
 side, and had already as many private pupils as he could take. His 
 spare furniture had been removed to a noble suite of Fellow's 
 rooms in the Cloister Court. The worn, faded bit of carpet was 
 there beside his bed — it looked terribly out of place, but he 
 wouldn't have exchanged it for the finest rug from the looms of 
 Persia — and his old narrow shaving-glass, that had so often 
 reflected his sorrowful face, and the book-shelves with the dear 
 old musty classics in their shabby bindings, and the old coach's 
 silver inkstand in a place of honour, with the inscription well 
 brushed up. 
 
 The two little Chelsea Cupids — the dear Little man that he had 
 wept over in his childhood, and Mary Barclay's gift — stood side by 
 side, and were the presiding lares et penates of his lonely hearth. 
 The ladies of the ballet, and the pets of the ring, with many other 
 reminiscences of his undergraduate days, were now adorning his 
 old bedmaker's best parlour ; but the bishops and divines were 
 
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 291 
 
 hanging on his panelled walls, and gave a scholarly air to his bare 
 rooms. 
 
 During his first term of residence in Cloister Court he had 
 received a brief letter from Lilian Howell. It consisted of a few 
 meagre lines, begging his forgiveness for the cruel injustice she 
 had done him for so many months — and nothing more. 
 
 He replied as briefly, freely and frankly forgiving the unfounded 
 suspicions and misunderstandings that had blighted his life— and 
 nothing more. 
 
 Another niece was keeping house for the Master of Trinity, 
 Jnd Lilian Howell was Hving abroad. For two whole weary years 
 she never appeared in the courts of Trinity ; and when, in the 
 third year, she reappeared at intervals in a nurse's garb, as an 
 occasional visitor at the Lodge, there were few men left in Trinity 
 v:ho remembered her sad story. 
 
 A great deal had happened during these two years. Mr. Routh, 
 who had always remained Herbert's kindest and wisest friend, had 
 had a paralytic seizure, and Herbert was acting as his deputy. He 
 had also been ordained meanwhile. It had not been his intention 
 to enter the Church, but his kind old tutor had pressed it upon 
 him. 
 
 ' One never knows what may happen,' he said one day, in talking 
 to Herbert about the future. ' The unexpected, as a rule, does 
 happen, but it is always as well to be prepared. I think it would 
 be a wise step, and certainly it would be a safe one, to enter the 
 Church ; and you have no conscientious scruples ?' 
 
 1 No, thank God !' said Herbert humbly ; and so he was ordained. 
 
 Jayne had come up for his M.A. degree meanwhile. He was 
 vicar now in the parish where he was formerly curate, and he was 
 still working hard at the mission. 
 
 Brown had done great things in a fresh field of missionary 
 enterprise in Africa, and there was some talk of founding a new 
 colonial bishopric. The cause had spread with the rapidity and 
 astonishing results of the old Apostolic days. Perhaps in the fiery 
 zeal of the humble son of Trinity, there was something of the 
 Apostolic ardour of the men of old, who held not their lives dear, 
 but counted all things but dross in comparison with the blessedness 
 of their Master's service. 
 
 Harvard had returned to the States, a pioneer of the great wave 
 of muscular Christianity that has spread from one end of the 
 Western Continent to the other. He is still the best half-back in 
 the States, and the champion oar of Harvard ; and his athletic 
 friends admit that he hits out as straight from the shoulder in the 
 pulpit as he does in the ring — which is admitting a great deal. 
 
 He has left a record behind him in the old country — a record, 
 we will hope an enduring one — with which his name will ever be 
 associated. Not in the gold-emblazoned roll of the Honoris Causd 
 of Emmanuel College, not in the stirring records of the Cambridge 
 
 19—2 
 
292 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 University Athletic Club, not in the reports of the Union debates, 
 though in all these he had won distinction. Who can ever predict 
 which of all the acts of a useful, many-sided life will be longest 
 remembered — will survive the rest ? 
 
 The barrow mission that he suggested to Jayne, on a steaming 
 hot July day in the slums of London, is now an accomplished fact, 
 and in order to perpetuate the name of its originator it is called 
 ' The Harvard Mission.' 
 
 During his last long vacation abroad — and Herbert spent much of 
 his leisure time now on the Continent — he had come across an old 
 friend most unexpectedly. It was in the crowded Casino at Monte 
 Carlo. A woman with dark hair and expressive shoulders was 
 playing at one of the tables. Herbert thought he knew the fringe ; 
 but her back was towards him, and a faint odour of patchouli was 
 in his nostrils. 
 
 In a moment the old schoolroom at Bratton rose up before him : 
 the tired little mother, the unruly children, and the pretty gouver- 
 nante down at heel. The lady, with a naive shrug of her expressive 
 shoulders, which were already too much en evidence, drew in her 
 winnings, and Herbert's near neighbour gave an impatient ' pshaw !' 
 as the croupier gathered in his stakes. 
 
 ' That woman has the devil's luck V he said impatiently. 
 
 1 "Who is she ?' Herbert asked carelessly. 
 
 ' Oh, Madame G-rinley ; there is some collusion between her and 
 the croupier, I am sure.' 
 
 And the man who had lost his money went out of the room 
 cursing his folly. 
 
 ' Madame G-rinley !' Herbert repeated to himself, as he loitered 
 slowly round the table watching the players. The croupier's inex- 
 orable rake gathered in the stakes, and still the silly lambkins 
 crowded round the table eager to be fleeced. Herbert's honest eyes 
 followed the rake home. The croupier was so absorbed in the 
 game that he did not see him. Herbert caught the fiery gleam of a 
 great opal on the white fingers that mechanically drew in the rake, 
 and he raised his eyes to the man's face. 
 
 The croupier was Mr. G-rinley. 
 
 Herbert hurried out of the room ; he had no wish to renew that 
 long-forgotten acquaintance. He had to pass on the other side of 
 the table, and as he came opposite the fair winner of the stakes, 
 who had been pointed out to him as Madame Grinley, he involun- 
 tarily looked across the table. The lady looked up at the same 
 moment, and beneath the well-remembered fringe he encountered 
 the shining dark eyes of Julie. 
 
 During that third year Mr. Routh failed visibly, but growing 
 mellower, and kinder, and gentler with the years. He had quite 
 lost the use of one side now, and had to be carried up the stairs he 
 had trod so many years with such dignity, and he was wheeled into 
 
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 293 
 
 chapel a feeble, broken-down old man, whose working day was 
 spent. Bnt he was still a tutor of Trinity. Herbert was deputy 
 tutor, and did all his work beside his own. His hands were much 
 too full now to think about the lonely, unrewarded future that he 
 had once told himself lay before him. Time had softened the 
 bitterness of his sorrow, and his mind was flowing again in its 
 long-accustomed channels, with all his sympathies quickened and 
 enlarged. There was a great gap already between him and the 
 undergraduates whose ranks he had so lately left. They looked up 
 to him with a reverential awe as if he were a Don, and came to him 
 for advice and counsel as if he had been years their senior. 
 
 Mr. Routh had no need to urge upon him, as he always was 
 urging upon him in their solitary walks — at least, Herbert did the 
 walking, and pushed the paralyzed tutor's chair before him through 
 the trim paths of the Fellows' gardens — to be generous and lenient 
 in dealing with the faults and follies of other men. His own ex- 
 perience had already taught him that gentle lesson. 
 
 They sometimes encountered Lilian Howell and the old Master 
 in these secluded walks, and the two feeble old scholars would 
 babble away beneath the chestnuts, while the young people dropped 
 behind — and talked about the weather. 
 
 They did not always talk about the weather ; but they never 
 referred to those sad days clouded by suspicion — to the dreadful 
 tragedy that had been enacted in Neville's Court. The old, 
 pleasant, unreserved intercourse of those happy days after Herbert's 
 accident on the river, when the gracious mistress presided over the 
 Lodge, was renewed as if there had been no break. 
 
 Lilian Howell had offered herself, and been accepted by the 
 Church Missionary Society, for work in the Zenana Mission in the 
 East, and she was completing a six months' probation of nursing 
 at Addenbroke's Hospital before being sent to the front of the battle. 
 
 Herbert had some thoughts of going too, and he seriously talked 
 the matter over with Mr. Routh, who smilingly dissuaded him. 
 The college couldn't spare him. 
 
 Two events happened on the memorable blue day in June when 
 he took his M.A. degree. Mr. Routh resigned his office of college 
 tutor, and the Seniority unanimously invited Herbert to fill his 
 place, and elected him a Senior Fellow. 
 
 When he came back from the Senate-house, blushing above his 
 new silk M.A. hood, the old tutor gave him some friendly advice. 
 
 ' The next change will be scarlet,' he said, smiling and stroking 
 the white gleaming silk folds with his feeble hand ; ' but I shall 
 not be here to see it. I want you to promise me, Flowers, now 
 that you will sit in my place, to deal with the great trust that has 
 been committed to you more kindly and wisely than I have. 
 Looking back upon my life here, I am constrained to acknowledge 
 that I have been hard and unsympathetic, and extreme to mark 
 what has been done amiss. I have never sought to win the con- 
 
294 A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 
 
 fidence of the men, nor encouraged them to come to me in their 
 troubles. When the Black Book is opened hereafter, with the 
 dreary records of the useful careers that have been blighted 
 through undue severity, may the Recording Angel deal more 
 leniently with me than I have dealt with the young thoughtless 
 lives that have been committed to me ! 
 
 ' Remember always, Flowers, while upholding the dignity of the 
 college, to spoil no man's life by harshness or undue severity. Re- 
 member, however just the sentence, that they have their lives to 
 live, and give them, for my sake, another chance. In order that 
 this warning and injunction may be ever fresh in your mind, I 
 have, with the Master's permission, had a dovecote set up in the 
 Fellows' gardens, to remind you, as you see the pigeons wheeling 
 above, of the vain, foolish flights of youth when first set free from 
 restraint.' 
 
 Herbert put on his cap after Hall, and crossed the court to see 
 the dovecote in the Fellows' gardens instead of going back to his 
 rooms. As he came out of Hall the postman put a letter in his 
 hands. It was from Jayne, and he read it as he went through the 
 avenue, with the sunlight falling down through the branches on his 
 path. Jayne had great news to tell. 
 
 ' Dear old Brown,' he wrote, ' is doing wonders. He quite 
 shames us with his energy and enthusiasm. He has beaten us all 
 in the race. The new bishopric question is settled, and Brown is 
 to be the first Bishop. Think of him, dear old fellow, after all his 
 failures and disasters ! And — how am I to tell you ? — he is coming 
 home to marry Mary Barclay !' 
 
 There was such a singing in Herbert's ears, and such a mist 
 before his eyes when he stood before the new dovecote, that he did 
 not notice that another person was viewing with mild astonish- 
 ment this unwonted sight in the Fellows' gardens. 
 
 The dovecote was already tenanted, and the pigeons were cooing 
 and trotting in and out of their new home, on housekeeping cares 
 intent ; and in the old nests in the tall elm-trees above the rooks 
 were babbling and chiding ; and all the glowing colours of the 
 bright June day were glowing brighter, and warmer, and mellower 
 as the sun went down. 
 
 Lilian Howell was the first to speak, as she stood in the sunshine, 
 in her sweet nurse's garb, with the pigeons cooing overhead. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Flowers, whose is this ?' she asked. * What does it 
 mean ?' 
 
 Then Herbert told her the story of his last success, and how this 
 had been set up as a warning and a guide to him. She congratu- 
 lated him in broken words, for there were tears already in her 
 foolish eyes. 
 
 And then he told her — where he got his courage from he never 
 knew — that this was the proud and happy moment that he had 
 looked forward to since the first day he had been in Trinity. This 
 
A FELLOW OF TRINITY. 295 
 
 little hand, that he had somehow, without his knowing, already 
 pinioned, was the prize he had worked for every day and hour 
 since he had been admitted a scholar of Trinity. This was the 
 goal he had laboured for ; this was the success he sought — this the 
 summit, the end of all his ambitions ! 
 
 The old, old story has been told so many times ; and the same, 
 very same, words have been said over and over again ; and there 
 is nothing new under the sun ! 
 
 The sun was quite tired of hearing it, and it slipped discreetly 
 off the grass, and climbed the gray wall of the college chapel, and 
 crept along the roof, and up into the sky, while Herbert was still 
 talking. And as they lingered still, side by side, in the old Fellows' 
 gardens, with the colours deepening and the shadows lengthening, 
 all the cooing and the chiding were borne to them across the dewy 
 fields, with all their sweet, solemn lessons of hope and warning. 
 
 a HE E\3, 
 
 BILLING AND SONS. PRINTERS. GUIUJFOHD. 
 
[May 1898. 
 
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 Folle Farine. 
 
 A Dog of Flanders. 
 
 Pa^carel. I Signa. 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 
 Ariadne. 
 
 Two Litt'e Wooden 
 
 In a Winter City. Shoes 
 
 Friendship. 
 
 Moths. I Ruffino. 
 
 Fipistrello. 
 
 A Village Commune. 
 
 Eimbi. | Wanda. 
 
 Frescoes. | Othmar. 
 
 In Maremma. 
 
 Syrltn. | Guilderoy. 
 
 Santa Barbara. 
 
 Two Offenders. 
 
 By MARGARET A. PAUL. 
 
 Gentle and Simple. 
 
 Bv JAMES PAYN. 
 
 Under One Roof. 
 Glow worm Ta'es 
 The Talk of the Town. 
 Holiday Tasks. 
 For Cash Only. 
 The Burnt Million. 
 The Word and the Wi'.l. 
 Sunny Stories. 
 A Trying Patient. 
 A Modern Dick Whit- 
 tington. 
 
 Lo:t Sir Massmgberd 
 Less Black than We're 
 
 Fainted. 
 A Confidential Agent. 
 A Grape from a Thorn. 
 It Peril and Privation. 
 'Hie Mystery of Mir- 
 Bv Proxy. [bridge. 
 
 The Canon's Ward. 
 Walter s Word. 
 High Spirits. 
 
 By WILL PAYNE. 
 Jerry the Dreamer. 
 
 By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED. 
 Outlaw a ud Lawmaker. [ Mis. Tregaskiss. 
 Christina Chard. | Nu'ma. 
 
 By E. C. PRICE. 
 Valentina. | Foreigners. I Mrs. lancasters Rival, 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 Miss Maxwell's Affections. 
 
 By CHARLES READE 
 
 Pes WofBngton ; and 
 
 Christie Johnstone. 
 Hard Cash. 
 Cloister & the Hearth. 
 Never Too Late to Mend 
 The Course of True 
 
 Love Never Did Run 
 
 Smooth ; and Single- 
 heart andDoubleface. 
 Autobiography of a 
 
 Thief ; Jack of all 
 
 Trades ; A Hero and 
 
 a Martyr ; and The 
 
 Wandering Heir. 
 Griffith Gaunt. 
 
 By Mrs. J. H 
 Weird Stories. 
 
 By AMEL1E RIVES. 
 Barbara Dermg. | Meriel. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 The Hands of Justice. 1 Woman in the Dark. 
 
 By HERBERT RUSSELL, 
 True Blue. 
 
 Love Me Little, Love 
 
 Me Long. 
 The Double Marriage. 
 Foul Play. 
 Put Yourself in His 
 
 Place. 
 A Terrible Temptation. 
 A Simpleton. 
 A Woman-Hater. 
 The Jilt, & others? cries : 
 & Good Stories of Man 
 and other Animals. 
 A Perilous Secret 
 Readiana ; and Eible 
 Characters. 
 R1DDELL. 
 
CHATTO & WINDUS, Publishers, in St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 20 
 
 The Piccadilly (y<"0 Novels— continued. 
 By VV. CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 My Shipmate Louise. 
 Alone onWideWide Sea. 
 The Phantom Death. 
 Is He the Man ? 
 Good Ship 'Mohock.' 
 The Convict Ship. 
 Heart of Oak. 
 The Tale of the Ten. 
 The Last Entry. 
 
 Round the Galley-Fire. 
 In the Middle Watch. 
 On the Fo'k'sle Head. 
 A Voyage to the Cape. 
 Book for the Hammock 
 Mysteryof 'Ocean Star' 
 The Romance of Jenny 
 
 Harlcwe. 
 An Ocean Tragedy. 
 
 By DORA RUSSELL. 
 A Country Sweetheart. I The Drift of Fate. 
 
 By BAYLE ST. JOHN. 
 A Levantine Family. 
 
 By ADELINE SERGEANT. 
 
 Dr Endicott s Experiment. 
 
 By HAWLEY SMART. 
 Without Love or Licence. I The Outsider. 
 The Master of Eathkelly. Beatrice & Benedick. 
 Long Odds. I A Racing Rubber. 
 
 By G, H. SNAZELLE. 
 Snazelleparilla. 
 
 By T. W. SPEIGHT. 
 A Secret of the Sea. j A Minion of the Moon. 
 The Grey Monk. The Secret of Wyvern 
 
 TheMasterof Trenance I Towers. 
 
 By ALAN ST. AUBYN. 
 A Fellow of Trinity. I In Face of the World. 
 The Junior Dean. Orchard Damerel. 
 
 MasterofSt. Benedict's. The Tremlett Diamonds. 
 To his Own Master. 1 
 
 By JOHN STAFFORD. 
 Doris and I. 
 
 By RICCARDO STEPHENS. 
 The Cruciform Mark. 
 _ By R. A. STERN DALE. 
 
 The Afghan Knife. 
 
 By R. LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 The Suicide Club. 
 
 By BERTHA THOMAS. 
 Proud Maisie. | The Violin-Player. 
 
 By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 The Way we Live Now. | Scarborough's Family. 
 The Land-Leaguers 
 E. TROLLOPE. 
 Anne Furness. 
 Mabels Progress. 
 
 Frau Frohmann 
 
 By FRANCES 
 
 Like Ships upon the 
 Sea. 
 
 By IVAN TURGEN1EFF, &c. 
 
 Stories from Foreign Novelists. 
 
 By MARK TWAIN. 
 
 Tom Sawyer, Detective. 
 Pudd'nhead Wilson. 
 The Gilded Age. 
 Prince and the Pauper. 
 Life on the Mississippi. 
 The Adventures of 
 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 A Yankee at the Court 
 
 of King Arthur. 
 Stolen White Elephant. 
 £1,000,000 Banknote. 
 
 Mark Twains Choice 
 
 Works. 
 Mark Twain's Library 
 
 of Humour. 
 The Innocents Abroad. 
 Roughing It ; and The 
 
 Innocents at Home. 
 A Tramp Abroad. 
 TheAmerican Claimant. 
 AdventuresTomSawyer 
 Tom Sawyer Abroad. 
 
 By C. C. FRASER=TYTLER. 
 
 Mistress Judith. 
 
 By SARAH TYTLER. 
 
 Lady Bell. | The Macdon^ld Lass. 
 
 Buried Diamonds. The Witch-Wife 
 
 The Blackball Ghosts. | 
 
 By ALLEN UPWARD. 
 The Queen against Owen I The Prince of Ba'kistan 
 
 By E. A. VIZETELLY. 
 
 The Scorpion : A Romance of Spain. 
 
 By CY WARMAN. 
 
 The Express Messenger, 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTALL. 
 
 Sons of Belial. 
 
 By ATHA WESTBURY. 
 
 The Shadow of Bilton Fernbrook. 
 
 By C. J. WILLS. 
 An Easy-going Fellow. 
 
 By JOHN STRANGE WINTER. 
 
 Cavalry Life and Regimental Legends 
 A Soldier's Children. 
 
 By MARGARET WYNMAN. 
 My Flirtations. 
 
 By E. ZOLA. 
 
 The Fortune of the Rougons: 
 
 The Abbe Mouret's Transgression. 
 
 The Downfall. 
 
 The Dream. 
 
 Dr. Pascal. 
 
 Money. | Lourdes 
 
 By 'Z Z.' 
 A Nineteenth Century Miracle 
 
 The Fat and the Thin. 
 His Excellency. 
 The Dram-Shop. 
 Rome. I Faris. 
 
 CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 7s. each. 
 By ARTEMUS WARD. 
 
 Artemus Ward Complete. 
 
 By EDMOND ABOUT. 
 
 The Fellah. 
 
 By HAMILTON AIDE. 
 
 Carr of Carrlyon. | Confidences. 
 
 By Mrs. ALEXANDER. 
 
 Maid. Wife, or Widow ? i A Life Interest. 
 Blind Fate. I Mona's Choice. 
 
 Valerie 3 Fate. | By Woman s Wit 
 
 By GRANT ALLEN. 
 
 Philistia. | Babylon 
 Strange Stories. 
 For Maimie's Sike. 
 In all Shades. 
 The Beckoning Hand. 
 The Devil's Die. 
 The Tents of Shem. 
 The Great Taboo. 
 
 By E. LESTER ARNOLD 
 
 Phra the Phoenician. 
 
 BY FRANK BARRETT, 
 
 Dumaresq's Dau^hte 
 Duchess of Powysiand. 
 Blood Royal. [piece- 
 Ivan Greet's Master. 
 The Scallywag. 
 Thii Mortal Coil. 
 At Market Value 
 Under Sealed Orders. 
 
 By SHELSLEY BEAUCHAMP. 
 
 Grantlev Grange. 
 
 By Sir W. BESANT and J. RICE. 
 
 Ready-Money Mortiboy I By Celia's Arbour 
 
 My Little Girl. ' 
 
 With Harp and Crown 
 
 This Son of Vulcan. 
 
 The Golden Butterfly. 
 
 The Monks of Thole 
 
 Chaplain of the Fleet. 
 The Seamy Side. 
 The Case of Mr.Lucraft 
 In Trafalgar's Bay. 
 The Ten Years' Tenant. 
 
 By Sir WALTER BESANT. 
 
 Fettered for Life. 
 Little Lady Linton. 
 Between Life <Ss Death. 
 Sin of Olga Zassoulich. 
 Folly Morrison. 
 Lieut. Barnabas. 
 Honest Pavi«. 
 
 A Prodigal s Progress. 
 Found Guilty. 
 A Recoiling Vengeance. 
 For Love and Honour. 
 John Ford, &c. 
 Woman of IronBracets 
 The Harding Scandal. 
 
 All Sorts and Condi 
 
 tions of Men. 
 The Captains' Room. 
 All in a Garden Fair. 
 Dorothy Forster. 
 Uncle Jack. 
 The World Went Very 
 
 Well Then. 
 Children of Gibeon. 
 Herr Paulus. 
 For Faith and Freedom. 
 Tj Call Her Mine. 
 
 By AMBROSE BIERCE. 
 In the Midst of Life. 
 
 By FREDERICK BOYLE. 
 Camp Notes. I Chronicles of No man 3 
 
 Savage Life. | Land. 
 
 BY BRET HARTE. 
 
 The Bell of St. Paul's. 
 
 The Holy Rose. 
 
 Arm orel of Lyonesse. 
 
 R.Katherine s'by Towr 
 Verbena Camellia Ste- 
 
 phanotis. 
 The Ivory Gate. 
 The Rebel Queen. 
 Beyond the Dreams of 
 
 Avarice. 
 The Revolt of Man. 
 In Deacon s Orders. 
 
 Californian Stories. 
 Gabriel Conroy. 
 Luck of Roaring Camp. 
 An Heiress of Red Dog. 
 
 Flip. 1 Manila. 
 
 A Phyllis of the Sierras 
 A Waif of the Plains. ' 
 Ward of Golden Gate, 
 
30 CHATTO & WINDUS, Publishers, ill St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 
 
 Two-Shilling Novels— continued. 
 By HAROLD BRYDGES. 
 Uncle Sam at Home. 
 
 By ROBERT BUCHANAN 
 
 The Martyrdom of Ma- 
 deline. 
 The New Abelard. 
 The Heir of Linne. 
 Woman and the Man. 
 Rachel Dene. | Matt. 
 Lady Kilpatrick. 
 
 Shadow of the Sword 
 A Child of Nature. 
 God and the Man. 
 love Me for Ever. 
 Foxglove Manor. 
 The Master of the Mine 
 Annan Water. 
 
 By BUCHANAN and MURRAY. 
 
 The Charlatan. 
 
 By HALL CAINE. 
 
 The Shadow of a Crime. I The Deemster. 
 A Son of Hagar. 
 
 By Commander CAMERON. 
 The Cruise of the ' Black Prince.' 
 
 By HAYDEN CARRUTH. 
 The Adventures of Jones. 
 
 By AUSTIN CLARE. 
 For the Love of a Lass. 
 
 By Mrs, ARCHER CLIVE. 
 
 Paul Ferroll. 
 
 Yv'hy Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife. 
 
 By MACLAREN COBBAN. 
 
 7 he Cure of Souls. | The Red Sultan. 
 
 By C. ALLSTON COLLINS. 
 
 The Bar Sinister. 
 
 By MORT. & FRANCES COLLINS 
 
 Sweet Anne Page. 
 
 Transmigration. 
 
 Fi om Midnight to Mid 
 
 night. 
 A Fight with Fortune. 
 
 By WILKIE COLLINS 
 
 Sweet and Twenty. 
 The Village Comedy. 
 You Play me False. 
 Blacksmith and Scholar 
 Frances. 
 
 Armadale. | AfterDark. 
 
 No Name. 
 
 Antonina. 
 
 Basil. 
 
 Hide and Seek. 
 
 The Dead Secret. 
 
 Queen of Hearts. 
 
 Miss or Mrs.? 
 
 "Shs New Magdalen. 
 
 The Frozen Deep. 
 
 The Law and the Lady 
 
 The Two Destinies. 
 
 The Haunted Hotel. 
 
 A Rogue's Life. 
 
 By M. J. COLQUHOUN. 
 Every Inch a Soldier. 
 
 By DUTTON COOK. 
 £ C0 | Paul Foster's Daughter. 
 
 By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK. 
 The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. 
 
 Bv MATT CRIM. 
 The Adventures of a Fair Rebel. 
 
 By b. M. CROKER. 
 Pretty Miss Neville. 
 
 My Miscellanies. 
 Tlie Woman in White. 
 The Moonstone. 
 Man and Wife. 
 Poor Miss Finch. 
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 Jezebels Daughter. 
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 Little Novels. 
 Legacy of Cain. 
 Blind Love. 
 
 Village Tales and Jung 
 
 Tragedies. 
 Two Masters. 
 Mr. Jervis. 
 The Real Lady Hilda. 
 Married or Single ? 
 
 Piana Barrington. 
 'To Let.' 
 
 A Bird of Passage 
 Proper Pride. 
 A Family Likeness 
 
 By VV. CYPLES. 
 Hearts of Gold. 
 
 By ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 The Evangelist ; or, Port Salvation. 
 
 By ERASMUS DAWSON. 
 The Fountain of Youth. 
 
 By JAMES DE MILLE. 
 A Castle in Spain. 
 
 By J. LE1TH DERWENT. 
 Our Lady of Tears. | Circe's Lovers. 
 
 By DICK DONOVAN. 
 
 In the Grip of the Law 
 Trom Information Re- 
 ceived. 
 Tracked to Doom. 
 Link by Link 
 Suspicion Aroused. 
 Dark Deeds. 
 Riddles Read. 
 
 The Man-Hunter, 
 Tracked and Taken. 
 Caught at Last 1 
 Wanted I 
 Who Poisoned Hetty 
 
 Duncan ? 
 Man from Manchester. 
 A Detective's Triumphs 
 The Mystery of Jamaica Terrace. 
 The Chronicles of Michael Danevitch. 
 
 By Mrs. ANNIE EDWARDES. 
 
 A Point of Honour. | Archie Lovell. 
 
 By M. BETHAM-EDWARDS. 
 
 Felicia. | Kitty. 
 
 By EDWARD EGGLESTON. 
 
 Roxy. 
 
 By G. MANVILLE FENN. 
 
 The New Mistress. I The Tiger Lily. 
 
 Witness to the Deed. | The White Virgin. 
 
 By PERCY FITZGERALD. 
 
 Bella Donna. 
 Never Forgotten. 
 Polly. 
 Fatal Zero. 
 
 Second Mrs. Tillotson. 
 Seventy - five Brooke 
 
 Street. 
 The Lady of Brantome 
 
 By P. FITZGERALD and others. 
 
 Strange Secrets. 
 
 By ALBANY DE FONBLANQUE. 
 
 Filthy Lucre. 
 
 E. FRANCILLON. 
 
 King or Knave ? 
 
 Romances of the Law. 
 
 Ropes of Sand. 
 
 A Dog and his Shadow. 
 
 By R. 
 
 Olympia. 
 One by One. 
 A Real Queen. 
 Queen Cophetua. 
 
 By HAROLD FREDERIC 
 Seth's Brother's Wife. I The Lawton Girl. 
 
 Prefaced by Sir BARTLE FRERE 
 Pandurang Hari. 
 
 By EDWARD GARRETT. 
 The Capel Girls. 
 
 By GILBERT GAUL. 
 
 A Strange Manuscript. 
 
 By CHARLES GIBBON. 
 
 Robin Gray. 
 
 Fancy Free. 
 
 For Lack of Gold. 
 
 What will World Say ? 
 
 In Love and War. 
 
 For the King. 
 
 In Pastures Green. 
 
 Queen of the Meadow. 
 
 A Heart's Problem. 
 
 The Dead Heart. 
 
 In Honour Bound. 
 Flower of the Forest. 
 The Braes of Yarrow. 
 The Golden Shaft. 
 Of High Degree. 
 By Mead and Stream. 
 Loving a Dream. 
 A Hard Knot. 
 Heart's Delight. 
 Blood-Money. 
 
 By WILLIAM GILBERT. 
 
 Dr. Austin s Guests. I The Wizard of 
 James Duke. I Mountain. 
 
 By ERNEST GLANVILLE. 
 
 The Lost Heiress. ! The Fossicker. 
 
 A Fair Colonist. | 
 
 By Rev. S. BARING GOULD. 
 
 Red Spider. | Lve. 
 
 By HENRY GREVILLE. 
 
 A Noble Woman. | Nikanor. 
 
 By CECIL GRIFFITH. 
 
 Corinthia Marazion. 
 
 By SYDNEY GRUNDY. 
 
 The Days of his Vanity. 
 
 By JOHN HABBERTON. 
 Brueton's Bayou. | Country Luck. 
 
 By ANDREW HALL1DAY. 
 Every day Papers. 
 
 By THOMAS HARDY. 
 Under the Greenwood Tree. 
 
 
CHATTO & WINbUS, Publishers, in St. Martiti's Lane, Lftndon* W.C. 3> 
 
 Beatrix Randolph. 
 
 Love— or a Name. 
 
 David Foindexter s Dis- 
 appearance. 
 
 The Spectre 
 Camera. 
 
 Two-Shilling Novels — continued. 
 
 By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 
 
 Garth. 
 
 Ellice Quentin. 
 
 Fortune s Fool. 
 
 M»ss Cadogna. 
 
 Sebastian Strome. 
 
 Dust. 
 
 By Sir ARTHUR HELPS. 
 
 Ivan de Biron. 
 
 Bv G. A. HENTV. 
 
 Rujub the Juggler. 
 
 By HENRY HERMAN. 
 
 A Leading Lady. 
 
 By HEADON HILL. 
 
 Camera the Detective. 
 
 By JOHN HiLL. 
 
 Treason Felony. 
 
 By Mrs. CASHEL HOEY. 
 
 The Lover s Creed. 
 
 By Mrs. GEORGE HOOPER. 
 
 The House of Raby. 
 
 By Mrs. HUNGERFORD 
 
 the- 
 
 The Three Graces 
 Unsatisfactory Lover, 
 Lady Patty. 
 Nora Creina. 
 The Professor's Experi- 
 ment. 
 
 A Maiden all Forlorn. 
 
 In Durance Vile. 
 
 Marvel. 
 
 A Mental Struggle. 
 
 A Modern Circe. 
 
 Lady Verners Flight 
 
 The Red House Mysteiy 
 
 By Mrs. ALFRED HUNT. 
 Thornicroft'8 Model. I Self-Condemned. 
 That Other Person. | The Leaden Casket. 
 
 By VVM. JAMESON. 
 
 My Dead Self. 
 
 By HARRIETT JAY. 
 
 The Dark Colleen. | Queen of Connaught. 
 
 By MARK KERSHAW. 
 Colonial Facts and Fictions. 
 
 By R. ASHE KING. 
 
 A Drawn Game. I Passions Slave 
 
 ' The Weaiing of the Bell Barry. 
 Green.' 
 
 ByEDMOND LEPELLETIER. 
 
 Madame Sans Gene 
 
 By JOHN LEYS. 
 
 The Lindsays. 
 
 By E. LYNN LINTON 
 
 The Atonement of Leam 
 
 Dundas. 
 Rebel of the Family. 
 Sowing the Wind. 
 The One Too Many. 
 Dulcie Evertou. 
 
 Patricia Kemball. 
 
 The World Well Lost. 
 
 Under which Lord ? 
 
 Faston Carew. 
 
 ' My Love I ' 
 
 lone. 
 
 With a Silken Thread. 
 
 By HENRY W. LUCY. 
 
 GideoFleyce. 
 
 By justin McCarthy. 
 
 Dear Lady Disdain. Donna Quixote 
 
 Waterdale Neighbours. Maid of Athens 
 Mv Enemy's Daughter. The Comet of a Season 
 A Fair Saxon. The Dictator. 
 
 Linley Rochford. Red Diamonds 
 
 Miss Misanthrope. The Riddle Ring 
 
 Camiola. 
 
 By HUGH MACCOLL. 
 Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet. 
 
 By GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 
 Heather and Snow. 
 
 By AGNES MACDONELL. 
 
 Quaker Cousins. 
 
 By KATHARINE S. MACQUOID. 
 
 The Evil Eye. | Lost Rose. 
 
 By W. H. MALLOCK. 
 
 A Komanee of the Nine- | The New Republic, 
 teentn Century. [ 
 
 By J. MASTERMAN. 
 
 Half a dozen Daughters. 
 
 By BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
 
 A Secret of the Sea. 
 
 By L. T. MEADE. 
 
 A Soldier of Fortune. 
 
 By LEONARD MERRICK. 
 
 The Man who wa3 Good. 
 
 By JEAN MIDDLEMASS. 
 
 ..ouch and Go. I Mr. Dorillion. 
 
 By Mrs. MOLES WORTH. 
 
 Hathercourt Rectory. 
 
 By J. E. MUDDOCK. 
 
 Stones Weird and Won- I From the Bosom of the 
 
 deriul. Deep. 
 
 The Dead Man's Secret. | 
 
 A^ B T r D .„ CMR,ST,E MURRAY. 
 
 A. Model Father. I A Bit of Human Nature 
 
 Josephs Coat. First Person Sin»ul r ' 
 
 Coals of Fire Bob Martin s Little Girl 
 
 val Strange. | Hearts. ! Times Revenges 
 Old Blazer's Hero. A Wasted Crime! 
 
 The Way of the World. Jn Direst Peril 
 Cynic Fortune. i Mount Despair 
 
 A Life's Atonement. j A Capful o' Nails 
 By the Gate of the Sea. ! 
 
 By MURRAY and HERMAN. 
 
 One Traveller Returns, j The Bishops' Bible 
 Paul Jones s Alias. 
 
 By HENRY MURRAY. 
 
 A Game of Bluff. | A Song of Sixpence 
 
 By HUME NISBET. 
 
 ' Eal1 ^P ! ' I Dr.BernardSfc. Vincent 
 
 By W. E. NORRIS. 
 
 Saint Ann s. 
 
 By ALICE O'HANLON. 
 
 The Unforeseen. | Chance ? or Fate ? 
 
 By GEORGES OHNET. 
 
 Dr. Rameau. I A Weird Gift. 
 
 A Last Love. 
 
 m By Mrs. OLIPHANT. 
 
 Whiteladies. I The Greatest Heiress in 
 
 Tne Primrose Path. | England. 
 
 ™. ?>' „ Mrs - ROBERT O'REILLY. 
 
 Phcebe B Fortunes. 
 
 By OUIDA. 
 
 '.hoes. 
 
 Wit. 
 
 Held in Bouda] 
 
 Strathmore. 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 Idalia. 
 
 Under Two Flags. 
 
 Cecil Castlemaine sGage 
 
 Tricotrin. 
 
 Puck. 
 
 Folle Farine. 
 
 A Dog of Flanders. 
 
 Pascarel. 
 
 Signa. 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 
 In a Winter City. 
 
 Ariadne. 
 
 Friendship. 
 
 By MARGARET AGNES PAUL, 
 
 Gentle and Simple. 
 
 _ „ By EDGAR A. POE. 
 
 The Mystery of Marie Roget 
 
 mv fy Mrs - CAMPBELL PRAED, 
 
 The Romance of a Station 
 
 The Soul of Countess Adrian. 
 
 Out'aw and Lawmaker 
 
 Christina Chard. j Mrs. Tregaskiss 
 
 By E. C. PRICE. 
 Valentina. , Mrs. Lancaster's Rival 
 
 The Foreigners. | Gerald. 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 
 Mies Maxwell" Affections. 
 
 Two Lit. Wood™ 
 Moths. 
 Bimbi. 
 Fipistrello. 
 A Village Commune 
 Wanda. 
 Othmar 
 Frescoes. 
 In Maremma. 
 Guilderoy. 
 Ruffino. 
 Syrlin. 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 Two Offenders 
 
 Ouida's Wisdom 
 
 and Pathos. 
 
32 CHATTO & WlNDUS, Publishers, iii St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 
 
 Two-Shilling Novels — continued. 
 By JAMES PAYN. 
 
 Bentincks Tutor. 
 
 Murphy's Master. 
 
 A County Family. 
 
 At Her Mercy. 
 
 Cecil's Tryst. 
 
 The Clyffards of C'yffe. 
 
 The Foster Brothers. 
 
 Found Dead. 
 
 The Best of Husbands. 
 
 Walter's Word 
 
 Halves. 
 
 Fallen Fortunes. 
 
 Humorous Stories. 
 
 £200 Reward. 
 
 A Marine Residence. 
 
 Mirk Abbey 
 
 By Proxy. 
 
 Under One Roof. 
 
 High Spirits. 
 
 Carlyon'B Year. 
 
 From Exile. 
 
 For Cash Only. 
 
 Hit. 
 
 The Canon s Ward. 
 
 The Talk of the Town. 
 Holiday Tasks. 
 A Perfect Treasure. 
 What He Cost Her. 
 A Confidential Agent. 
 Glowworm Tales. 
 The Burnt Million. 
 Sunny Stories. 
 Lost Sir Massingberd. 
 A Woman's Vengeance. 
 The Family Scapegrace. 
 Gwendoline s Harvest. 
 Like Father, Like Son. 
 Married Beneath Him. 
 Not Wooed, but Won. 
 Less Black than We re 
 
 Painted. 
 Some Private Views. 
 A Grape from a Thorn. 
 The Mystery of Mir- 
 
 bridge. 
 The Word and the Will. 
 A Prince of the Blood. 
 A Trying Patient. 
 
 By CHARLES READE. 
 
 It is Never Too Late to 
 
 Mend. 
 Christie Johnstone. 
 The Double Marriage. 
 Put Yourself in His 
 
 Place 
 Love Me Little, Love 
 
 Me Long. 
 The Cloister and the 
 
 Hearth. 
 The Course of True 
 
 Love. 
 The Jilt. 
 The Autobiography of 
 
 a Thief. 
 
 By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL 
 
 A Terrible Temptation. 
 
 Foul Play. 
 
 The Wandering Heir. 
 
 Hard Cash. 
 
 Singleheart and Double- 
 face. 
 
 Good Stories of Man and 
 other Animals. 
 
 Peg Woffington. 
 
 Griffith Gaunt. 
 
 A Perilous Secret. 
 
 A Simpleton. 
 
 Readiana. 
 
 A Woman-Hater. 
 
 The Uninhabited House. 
 The Mystery in Palace 
 
 Gardens. 
 The Nun's Curse. 
 Idle Tales. 
 
 Weird Stories. 
 Fairy Water. 
 Her Mother's Darling. 
 The Prince of Wales s 
 Garden Party. 
 
 By AMELIE RIVES. 
 Barbara Dering. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 Women are Strange. I The Woman in the Dark 
 The Hands of Justice. | 
 
 By JAMES RUNCIMAN. 
 Skippers and Shellbacks. | Schools and Scholars. 
 Grace Balmaign s Sweetheart. 
 
 By W. CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 Round the Galley Fire 
 
 On the Fo'k'sle Head. 
 
 In the Middle Watch. 
 
 A Voyage to the Cape. 
 
 A Book for the Ham- 
 mock. 
 
 The Mystery of the 
 ' Ocean Star.' 
 
 The Romance of Jenny 
 Harlowe. 
 
 By DORA RUSSELL. 
 
 A Country Sweetheart. 
 By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA 
 
 Gaslight and Daylight. 
 
 By GEORGE R. SIMS. 
 
 An Ocean Tragedy. 
 My Shipmate Louise. 
 Alone on Wide Wide Sea. 
 The Good Ship 'Mo- 
 hock.' 
 The Phantom Death. 
 Is He the Man. 
 Heart of Oak. 
 The Convict Ship. 
 
 Zeph. 
 
 Memoirs of a Landlady. 
 Scenes from the Show. 
 The 10 Commandments. 
 Dagonet Abroad. 
 Rogues and Vagabonds. 
 
 The Ring o Bells 
 Mary Jane's Memoirs 
 Mary Jane Married. 
 Tales of To-day. 
 Dramas of Life. 
 Tinkletop's Crime. 
 My Two Wives. 
 
 By ARTHUR SKETCHLEY 
 A Match in the Dark. 
 
 By HAWLEY SMART. 
 Without Love or Licence. I The Plunger. 
 Beatrice and Benedick. Long Odds. 
 The Master of Rathkeily. | 
 
 By T. VV. SPEIGHT. 
 
 The Mysteries of Heron i Back to Life. 
 
 Dyke. The LoudwaterTragedy. 
 
 The Golden Hoop. Burgos Romance. 
 
 Hoodwinked. Quittance in Full. 
 
 By Devious Way3. I A Husband from the Sea 
 
 By ALAN ST. AUBYN. 
 A Fellow of Trinity. | Orchard Damerel. 
 The Junior Dean. In the Face of theWorld. 
 
 Master of St. Benedict's Ths Tremlett Diamonds 
 To His Own Master. 
 
 By R. A. STERNDALE. 
 
 The Afghan Knife. 
 
 By R. LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 New Arabian Nights. 
 
 By BERTHA THOMAS. 
 
 Cressida. I The Violin-Player. 
 
 Proud Maisie. 
 
 By WALTER THORNBURY. 
 
 Tales for the Marines. | Old Stories Retold. 
 
 By T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. 
 Diamond Cut Diamond. 
 
 By F. ELEANOR TROLLOPE. 
 Like Ships upon the I Anne Furness. 
 Sea. [ Mabel's Progress. 
 
 By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 
 Frau Frohmann, 
 Marion Fay. 
 Kept in the Dark 
 John Caldigate 
 
 The Land-Leaguers. 
 The American Senator. 
 Mr. Scarborough's 
 Family. 
 
 The Way We Live Now. | GoldenLionof Grauper., 
 
 By J. T. TROWBRIDGE. 
 
 Farnell's Folly. 
 
 By IVAN TURGEN1EFF, &c. 
 
 Stories from Foreign Novelists. 
 
 By MARK TWAIN. 
 
 A Pleasure Trip on the 
 
 Continent. 
 The Gilded Age. 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 MarkTwain s Sketches. 
 Tom Sawyer. 
 A Tramp Abroad. 
 Stolen White Elephant. 
 
 By C. C. FRASER=TYTLER 
 
 Mistress Judith. 
 
 By SARAH TYTLER. 
 
 Life on the Mississippi. 
 The Prince and th9 
 
 Pauper. 
 A Yankee at the Court 
 
 of King Arthur. 
 The £1,000,OOJ Bank- 
 
 Note. 
 
 The Huguenot Family. 
 The Blackhall Ghosts. 
 What SheCameThrough 
 Beauty and the B*»st. 
 Citoyenne Jaqueliae. 
 
 The Bride's Pass. 
 Buried Diamonds 
 St. Mungo's City. 
 Lady Bell. 
 Noblesse Oblige. 
 Disappeared. 
 
 By ALLEN UPWARD. 
 The Queen against Owen, j Prince of Balki3tan. 
 ' God Save the Queen 1 ' 
 
 By AARON WATSON and LSLLIAS 
 
 WASSERMANN. 
 
 The Marquis of Cirabas. 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTALL. 
 
 Trust- Money. 
 
 By Mrs. F. H. WILLIAMSON. 
 
 A Child Widow. 
 
 By J. S. WINTER. 
 
 Cavalry Life. | Regimental Legends. 
 
 By H. F. WOOD. 
 
 The Passenger from Scotland Yard. 
 The Englishman of the Rue Cain. 
 
 By CELIA PARKER WOOLLEY. 
 Rachel Armstrong ; or, Love ami Theology. 
 
 By EDMUND YATES^ 
 The Forlorn Hope. I Castaway. 
 
 Land at Last. 
 
 By I. ZANGWILL. 
 Ghetto Tragedies. 
 
 OGPEN, SMALE AND CO. LIMITED, PRINTERS, GREAT SAFFRON HILL, E.C.