The party given at St. Hubert’s on this evening in the Eights week was
given in honour of a famous guest—the Lord Chancellor of the day, one
of the strongest members of a strong Government, of whom St. Hubert’s,
which had nurtured him through his four academic years, was quite
inordinately proud. It was very seldom that their great nursling was
able or willing to revisit the old nest. But the head of the college,
who had been in the same class-list and rowed in the same boat with the
politician, was now Vice-Chancellor of the University; and the greater
luminary had come to shine upon the lesser, by way of heightening the
dignity of both. For the man who has outsoared his fellows likes to
remind himself by contrast of his callow days, before the hungry and
fighting impulses had driven him down—a young eaglet—upon the
sheepfolds of law and politics; while to the majority of mankind, even
to-day, hero-worship, when it is not too exacting, is agreeable.
So all Oxford had been bidden. The great hall of St. Hubert’s, with its
stately portraits and its emblazoned roof, had been adorned with
flowers and royally lit up. From the hills round Oxford the “line of
festal light” made by its Tudor windows, in which gleamed the
escutcheons of three centuries, could have been plainly seen. The High
Street was full of carriages, and on the immaculate grass of the great
quadrangle, groups of the guests, the men in academic costume, the
women in the airiest and gayest of summer dresses, stood to watch the
arrivals. The evening was clear and balmy; moonrise and dying day
disputed the sky; and against its pale blue still scratched over with
pale pink shreds and wisps of cloud, the grey college walls,
battlemented and flecked with black, rose warmed and transfigured by
that infused and golden summer in which all, Oxford lay bathed. Through
open gateways there were visions of green gardens, girdled with lilacs
and chestnuts; and above the quadrangle towered the crocketed spire of
St. Mary’s, ethereally wrought, it seemed, in ebony and silver, the
broad May moon behind it. Within the hall, the guests were gathering
fast. The dais of the high table was lit by the famous candelabra
bequeathed to the college under Queen Anne; a piano stood ready, and a
space had been left for the college choir who were to entertain the
party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the
Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth,
such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him
his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was
helping him to receive. The guest of the evening had not yet appeared.
Mr. Sorell, in a master’s gown, stood talking with a man, also in a
master’s gown, but much older than himself, a man with a singular
head—both flat and wide—scanty reddish hair, touched with grey, a
massive forehead, pale blue eyes, and a long pointed chin. Among the
bright colours of so many of the gowns around him—the yellow and red of
the doctors of law, the red and black of the divines, the red and white
of the musicians—this man’s plain black was conspicuous. Every one who
knew Oxford knew why this eminent scholar and theologian had never
become a doctor of divinity. The University imposes one of her few
remaining tests on her D.D’s; Mr. Wenlock, Master of Beaumont, had
never been willing to satisfy it, so he remained undoctored. When he
preached the University sermon he preached in the black gown; while
every ambitious cleric who could put a thesis together could flaunt his
red and black in the Vice-Chancellor’s procession on Sundays in the
University church. The face was one of mingled irony and melancholy,
and there came from it sometimes the strangest cackling laugh.
“Well, you must show me this phoenix,” he was saying in a nasal voice
to Sorell, who had been talking eagerly. “Young women of the right sort
are rare just now.”
“What do you call the right sort, Master?”
“Oh, my judgment doesn’t count. I only ask to be entertained.”
“Well, talk to her of Rome, and see if you are not pleased.”
The Master shrugged his shoulders.
“They can all do it—the clever sort. They know too much about the
Forum. They make me wish sometimes that Lanciani had never been born.”
Sorell laughed.
“This girl is not a pedant.”
“I take your word. And of course I remember her father. No pedantry
there. And all the scholarship that could be possibly expected from an
earl. Ah, is this she?”
For in the now crowded hall, filled with the chatter of many voices, a
group was making its way from the doorway, on one member of which many
curious eyes had been already turned. In front came Mrs. Hooper,
spectacled, her small nose in air, the corners of her mouth sharply
drawn down. Then Dr. Ewen, grey-haired, tall and stooping; then Alice,
pretty, self-conscious, provincial, and spoilt by what seemed an
inherited poke; and finally a slim and stately young person in white
satin, who carried her head and her long throat with a remarkable
freedom and self-confidence. The head was finely shaped, and the eyes
brilliant; but in the rest of the face the features were so delicate,
the mouth, especially, so small and subtle, as to give a first
impression of insignificance. The girl seemed all eyes and neck, and
the coils of brown hair wreathed round the head were disproportionately
rich and heavy. The Master observing her said to himself—“No beauty!”
Then she smiled—at Sorell apparently, who was making his way towards
her—and the onlooker hurriedly suspended judgment. He noticed also that
no one who looked at her could help looking again; and that the nervous
expression natural to a young girl, who realises that she is admired
but that policy and manners forbid her to show any pleasure in the
fact, was entirely absent.
“She is so used to all her advantages that she forgets them,” thought
the Master, adding with an inward smile—“but if we forgot them—perhaps
that would be another matter! Yes—she is like her mother—but taller.”
For on that day ten years earlier, when Ella Risborough had taken
Oxford by storm, she and Lord Risborough had found time to look in on
the Master for twenty minutes, he and Lord Risborough having been
frequent correspondents on matters of scholarship for some years. And
Lady Risborough had chattered and smiled her way through the Master’s
lonely house—he had only just been appointed head of his college and
was then unmarried—leaving a deep impression.
“I must make friends with her,” he thought, following Ella Risborough’s
daughter with his eyes. “There are some gaps to fill up.”
He meant in the circle of his girl protégées. For the Master had a
curious history, well known in Oxford. He had married a cousin of his
own, much younger than himself; and after five years they had
separated, for reasons undeclared. She was now dead, and in his
troubled blue eyes there were buried secrets no one would ever know.
But under what appeared to a stranger to be a harsh, pedantic exterior
the Master carried a very soft heart and an invincible liking for the
society of young women. Oxford about this time was steadily filling
with girl students, who were then a new feature in its life. The Master
was a kind of queer patron saint among them, and to a chosen three or
four, an intimate mentor and lasting friend. His sixty odd years, and
the streaks of grey in his red straggling locks, his European
reputation as a scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet
house, forbade the slightest breath of scandal in connection with these
girl-friendships. Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself,
whose essays he read, whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he
watched over, and in whose subsequent love affairs he took the
liveliest interest, were rarely or never plain to look upon. He chose
them for their wits, but also for their faces. His men friends observed
it with amusement. The little notes he wrote them, the birthday
presents he sent them—generally some small worn copy of a French or
Latin classic—his coveted invitations, or congratulations, were all
marked by a note of gallantry, stately and old-fashioned like the
furniture of his drawing-room, but quite different from anything he
ever bestowed upon the men students of his college.
Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites. One, a delicious
creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing
verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he
really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband;
and the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest hand and
foot, whom he and others were hopefully piloting towards a second class
at least—possibly a first—in the Honour Classical School, had broken
down in health, so that her mother and a fussy doctor had hurried her
away to a rest-cure in Switzerland, and thereby slit her academic life
and all her chances of fame. Both had been used to
come—independently—for the Master was in his own, way far too great a
social epicure to mix his pleasures—to tea on Sundays; to sit on one
side of a blazing fire, while the Master sat on the other, a Persian
cat playing chaperon on the rug between, and the book-lined walls of
the Master’s most particular sanctum looking down upon them; while in
the drawing-room beyond, Miss Wenlock, at the tea-table, sat patiently
waiting till her domestic god should declare the seance over, allow her
to make tea, and bring in the young and honoured guest. And now both
charmers had vanished from the scene and had left no equals behind. The
Master, who possessed the same sort of tact in training young women
that Lord Melbourne showed in educating the girl-Queen, was left
without his most engaging occupation.
Ah!—that good fellow, Sorell, was bringing her up to him.
“Master, Lady Constance would like to be introduced to you.”
The Master was immensely flattered. Why should she wish to be
introduced to such an old fogey? But there she was, smiling at him.
“You knew my father. I am sure you did!”
His elderly heart was touched, his taste captured at once. Sorell had
engineered it all perfectly. His description of the girl had fired the
Master; and his sketch of the Master in the girl’s ear, as a kind of
girlhood’s arbiter, had amused and piqued her. “Yes, do introduce me!
Will he ever ask me to tea? I should be so alarmed!”
It was all settled in a few minutes. Sunday was to see her introduction
to the Master’s inner circle, which met in summer, not between books
and a blazing fire, but in the small college garden hidden amid the
walls of Beaumont. Sorell was to bring her. The Master did not even go
through the form of inviting either Mrs. Hooper or Miss Hooper. In all
such matters he was a chartered libertine and did what he pleased.
Then he watched her in what seemed something of a triumphal progress
through the crowded hall. He saw the looks of the girl students from
the newly-organised women’s colleges—as she passed—a little askance and
chill; he watched a Scotch metaphysical professor, with a fiery face
set in a mass of flaming hair and beard, which had won him the nickname
from his philosophical pupils of “the devil in a mist,” forcing an
introduction to her; he saw the Vice-Chancellor graciously unbending,
and man after man come up among the younger dons to ask Sorell to
present them. She received it all with a smiling and nonchalant grace,
perfectly at her ease, it seemed, and ready to say the right thing to
young and old. “It’s the training they get—the young women of her
sort—that does it,” thought the Master. “They are in society from their
babyhood. Our poor, battered aristocracy—the Radicals have kicked away
all its natural supports, and left it _dans l’air_; but it can still
teach manners and the art to please. The undergraduates, however, seem
shy of her.”
For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly
at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no
one among them approached her. She held her court among the seniors, as
no doubt, thought the Master, she had been accustomed to do from the
days of her short frocks. He envisaged the apartment in the Palazzo
Barberini whereof the fame had often reached Oxford, for the
Risboroughs held open house there for the English scholar and professor
on his travels. He himself had not been in Rome for fifteen years, and
had never made the Risboroughs’ acquaintance in Italy. But the kind of
society which gathers round the English peer of old family who takes an
apartment in Rome or Florence for the winter was quite familiar to
him—the travelling English men and women of the same class, diplomats
of all nations, high ecclesiastics, a cardinal or two, the heads of the
great artistic or archæological schools, Americans, generals, senators,
deputies—with just a sprinkling of young men. A girl of this girl’s age
and rank would have many opportunities, of course, of meeting young
men, in the free and fascinating life of the Roman spring, but
primarily her business in her mother’s salon would have been to help
her mother, to make herself agreeable to the older men, and to gather
her education—in art, literature, and politics—as a coming woman of the
world from their talk. The Master could see her smiling on a
monsignore, carrying tea to a cardinal, or listening to the Garibaldian
tales of some old veteran of the Risorgimento.
“It is an education—of its own kind,” he thought. “Is it worth more or
less than other kinds?”
And he looked round paternally on some of the young girl students then
just penetrating Oxford; fresh, pleasant faces—little positive
beauty—and on many the stamp, already prematurely visible, of the
anxieties of life for those who must earn a livelihood. Not much taste
in dress, which was often clumsy and unbecoming; hair, either untidy,
or treated as an enemy, scraped back, held in, the sole object being to
take as little time over it as possible; and, in general, the note upon
them all of an educated and thrifty middle-class. His feelings, his
sympathies, were all with them. But the old gallant in him was stirred
by the tall figure in white satin, winding its graceful way through the
room and conquering as it went.
“Ah—now that fellow, Herbert Pryce, has got hold of her, of course! If
ever there was a climber!—But what does Miss Hooper say?”
And retreating to a safe corner the Master watched with amusement the
flattering eagerness with which Mr. Pryce, who was a fellow of his own
college, was laying siege to the newcomer. Pryce was rapidly making a
great name for himself as a mathematician. “And is a second-rate
fellow, all the same,” thought the Master, contemptuously, being like
Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice
Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching—with a strained and
furtive attention—the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was
really a tragedy; at least a tragi-comedy. Some girls are born to be
supplanted!
But who was it Sorell was, introducing to her now?—to the evident
annoyance of Mr. Pryce, who must needs vacate the field. A striking
figure of a youth! Golden hair, of a wonderful ruddy shade, and a clear
pale face; powerfully though clumsily made; and with a shy and
sensitive expression.
The Master turned to enquire of a Christ Church don who had come up to
speak to him.
“Who is that young man with a halo like the ‘Blessed Damosel’?”
“Talking to Lady Constance Bledlow? Oh, don’t you know? He is Sorell’s
protégé, Radowitz, a young musician—and poet!—so they say. Sorell
discovered him in Paris, made great friends with him, and then
persuaded him to come and take the Oxford musical degree. He is at
Marmion, where the dons watch over him. But they say he has been
abominably ragged by the rowdy set in college—led by that man Falloden.
Do you know him?”
“The fellow who got the Ireland last year?”
The other nodded.
“As clever and as objectionable as they make ’em! Ah, here comes our
great man!”
For amid a general stir, the Lord Chancellor had made his entrance, and
was distributing greetings, as he passed up the hall, to his academic
contemporaries and friends. He was a tall, burly man, with a strong
black head and black eyes under bushy brows, combined with an infantile
mouth and chin, long and happily caricatured in all the comic papers.
But in his D.C.L. gown he made a very fine appearance; assembled Oxford
was proud of him as one of the most successful of her sons; and his
progress toward the dais was almost royal.
Suddenly, his voice—a famous _voix d’or_, well known in the courts and
in Parliament—was heard above the general buzz. It spoke in
astonishment and delight.
“Lady Constance! where on earth have you sprung from? Well, this is a
pleasure!”
And Oxford looked on amused while its distinguished guest shook a young
lady in white by both hands, asking eagerly a score of questions, which
he would hardly allow her to answer. The young lady too was evidently
pleased by the meeting; her face had flushed and lit up; and the
bystanders for the first time thought her not only graceful and
picturesque, but positively handsome.
“Ewen!” said Mrs. Hooper angrily in her husband’s ear, “why didn’t
Connie tell us she knew Lord Glaramara! She let me talk about him to
her—and never said a word!—a single word!”
Ewen Hooper shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m sure I don’t know, my dear.”
Mrs. Hooper turned to her daughter who had been standing silent and
neglected beside her, suffering, as her mother well knew, torments of
wounded pride and feeling. For although Herbert Pryce had been long
since dismissed by Connie, he had not yet returned to the side of the
eldest Miss Hooper.
“I don’t like such ways,” said Mrs. Hooper, with sparkling eyes. “It
was ill-bred and underhanded of Connie not to tell us at once—I shall
certainly speak to her about it!”
“It makes us look such fools,” said Alice, her mouth pursed and set. “I
told Mr. Pryce that Connie knew no one to-night, except Mr. Sorell and
Mr. Falloden.”
The hall grew more crowded; the talk more furious. Lord Glaramara
insisted, with the wilfulness of the man who can do as he pleases, that
Constance Bledlow—whoever else came and went—should stay beside him.
“You can’t think what I owed to her dear people in Rome three years
ago!” he said to the Vice-Chancellor. “I adored her mother! And
Constance is a charming child. She and I made great friends. Has she
come to live in Oxford for a time? Lucky Oxford! What—with the Hoopers?
Don’t know ’em. I shall introduce her to some of my particular allies.”
Which he did in profusion, so that Constance found herself bewildered
by a constant stream of new acquaintances—fellows, professors, heads of
colleges—of various ages and types, who looked at her with amused and
kindly eyes, talked to her for a few pleasant minutes and departed,
quite conscious that they had added a pebble to the girl’s pile and
delighted to do it.
“It is your cousin, not the Lord Chancellor, who is the guest of the
evening!” laughed Herbert Pryce, who had made his way back at last to
Alice Hooper. “I never saw such a success!”
Alice tossed her head in a petulant silence; and a madrigal by the
college choir checked any further remarks from Mr. Pryce. After the
madrigal came a general move for refreshments, which were set out in
the college library and in the garden. The Lord Chancellor must needs
offer his arm to his host’s sister, and lead the way. The Warden
followed, with the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, and the hall
began to thin. Lord Glaramara looked back, smiling and beckoning to
Constance, as though to say—“Don’t altogether desert me!”
But a voice—a tall figure—interposed—
“Lady Constance, let me take you into the garden? It’s much nicer than
upstairs.”
A slight shiver ran, unseen, through the girl’s frame. She wished to
say no; she tried to say no. And instead she looked up—haughty, but
acquiescent.
“Very well.”
And she followed Douglas Falloden through the panelled passage outside
the hall leading to the garden. Sorell, who had hurried up to find her,
arrived in time to see her disappearing through the lights and shadows
of the moonlit lawn.
“We can do this sort of thing pretty well, can’t we? It’s banal because
it happens every year, and because it’s all mixed up with salmon
mayonnaise, and cider-cup—and it isn’t banal, because it’s Oxford!”
[Illustration: Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with
Falloden at her feet]
Constance was sitting under the light shadow of a plane-tree, not yet
fully out; Falloden was stretched on the grass at her feet. Before her
ran a vast lawn which had taken generations to make; and all round it,
masses of flowering trees, chestnuts, lilacs, laburnums, now advancing,
now receding, made inlets or promontories of the grass, turned into
silver by the moonlight. At the furthest edge, through the pushing
pyramids of chestnut blossom and the dim drooping gold of the
laburnums, could be seen the bastions and battlements of the old city
wall, once a fighting reality, now tamed into the mere ornament and
appendage of this quiet garden. Over the trees and over the walls rose
the spires and towers of a wondrous city; while on the grass, or
through the winding paths disappearing into bosky distances, flickered
white dresses, and the slender forms of young men and maidens. A murmur
of voices rose and fell on the warm night air; the sound of singing—the
thin sweetness of boyish notes—came from the hall, whose decorated
windows, brightly lit, shone out over the garden.
“It’s Oxford—and it’s Brahms,” said Constance. “I seem to have known it
all before in music: the trees—the lawn—the figures—appearing and
disappearing—the distant singing—”
She spoke in a low, dreamy tone, her chin propped on her hand. Nothing
could have been, apparently, quieter or more self-governed than her
attitude. But her inner mind was full of tumult; resentful memory;
uneasy joy; and a tremulous fear, both of herself and of the man at her
feet. And the man knew it, or guessed it. He dragged himself a little
nearer to her on the grass.
“Why didn’t you tell me when you were coming?”
The tone was light and laughing.
“I owe you no account of my actions,” said the girl quickly.
“We agreed to be friends.”
“No! We are not friends.” She spoke with suppressed violence, and
breaking a twig from the tree overshadowing her, she threw it from her,
as though the action were a relief.
He sat up, looking up into her face, his hands clasped round his knees.
“That means you haven’t forgiven me?”
“It means that I judge and despise you,” she said passionately; “and
that it was not an attraction to me to find you here—quite the
reverse!”
“Yet here you are—sitting with me in this garden—and you are looking
delicious! That dress becomes you so—you are so graceful—so exquisitely
graceful. And you never found a more perfect setting than this
place—these lawns and trees—and the old college walls. Oxford was
waiting for you, and you for Oxford. Are you laughing at me?”
“Naturally!”
“I could rave on by the hour if you would listen to me.”
“We have both something better to do—thank goodness! May I ask if you
are doing any work?”
He laughed.
“Ten hours a day. This is my first evening out since March. I came to
meet you.”
Constance bowed ironically. Then for the first time, since their
conversation began, it might have been seen that she had annoyed him.
“Friends are not allowed to doubt each other’s statements!” he said
with animation. “You see I still persist that you allowed me that name,
when—you refused me a better. As to my work, ask any of my friends.
Talk to Meyrick. He is a dear boy, and will tell you anything you like.
He and I ‘dig’ together in Beaumont Street. My schools are now only
three weeks off. I work four hours in the morning. Then I play till
six—and get in another six hours between then and 1 a.m.”
“Wonderful!” said Constance coolly. “Your ways at Cannes were
different. It’s a mercy there’s no Monte Carlo within reach.”
“I play when I play, and work when I work!” he said with emphasis. “The
only thing to hate and shun always—is moderation.”
“And yet you call yourself a classic! Well, you seem to be sure of your
First. At least Uncle Ewen says so.”
“Ewen Hooper? He is a splendid fellow—a real Hellenist. He and I get on
capitally. About your aunt—I am not so sure.”
“Nobody obliges you to know her,” was the tranquil reply.
“Ah!—but if she has the keeping of you! Are you coming to tea with me
and my people? I have got a man in college to lend me his rooms. My
mother and sister will be up for two nights. Very inconsiderate of
them—with my schools coming on—but they would do it. Thursday?—before
the Eights? Won’t my mother be chaperon enough?”
“Certainly. But it only puts off the evil day.”
“When I must grovel to Mrs. Hooper?—if I am to see anything of you?
Splendid! You are trying to discipline me again—as you did at Cannes!”
In the semidarkness she could see the amusement in his eyes. Her own
feeling, in its mingled weakness and antagonism, was that of the
feebler wrestler just holding his ground, and fearing every moment to
be worsted by some unexpected trick of the game. She gave no signs of
it, however.
“I tried, and I succeeded!” she said, as she rose. “You found out that
rudeness to my friends didn’t answer! Shall we go and get some
lemonade? Wasn’t that why you brought me here? I think I see the tent.”
They walked on together. She seemed to see—exultantly—that she had both
angered and excited him.
“I am never rude,” he declared. “I am only honest! Only nobody, in this
mealy-mouthed world, allows you to be honest; to say and do exactly
what represents you. But I shall not be rude to anybody under your
wing. Promise me to come to tea, and I will appear to call on your aunt
and behave like any sucking dove.”
Constance considered it.
“Lady Laura must write to Aunt Ellen.”
“Of course. Any other commands?”
“Not at present.”
“Then let me offer some humble counsels in return. I beg you not to
make friends with that red-haired _poseur_ I saw you talking to in the
hall.”
“Mr. Radowitz!—the musician? I thought him delightful! He is coming to
play to me to-morrow.”
“Ah, I thought so!” said Falloden wrathfully. “He is an impossible
person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own
poems when he hasn’t been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with
the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on
in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able to keep out of
it.”
“He is an artist!” cried Constance. “You have only to look at him, to
talk to him, to see it. And artists are always persecuted by stupid
people. But you are not stupid!”
“Yes, I am, where _poseurs_ are concerned,” said Falloden coldly. “I
prefer to be. Never mind. We won’t excite ourselves. He is not worth
it. Perhaps he’ll improve—in time. But there is another man I warn you
against—Mr. Herbert Pryce.”
“A great friend of my cousins’,” said Constance mockingly.
“I know. He is always flirting with the eldest girl. It is a shame; for
he will never marry her. He wants money and position, and he is so
clever he will get them. He is not a gentleman, and he rarely tells the
truth. But he is sure to make up to you. I thought I had better tell
you beforehand.”
“My best thanks! You breathe charity!”
“No—only prudence. And after my schools I throw my books to the dogs,
and I shall have a fortnight more of term with nothing to do except—are
you going to ride?” he asked her abruptly. “You said at Cannes that you
meant to ride when you came to Oxford.”
“My aunt doesn’t approve.”
“As if that would stop you! I can tell you where you can get a horse—a
mare that would just suit you. I know all the stables in Oxford. Wait
till we meet on Thursday. Would you care to ride in Lathom Woods? (He
named a famous estate near Oxford.) I have a permit, and could get you
one. They are relations of mine.”
Constance excused herself, but scarcely with decision. Her plans, she
said, must depend upon her cousins. Falloden smiled and dropped the
subject for the moment. Then, as they moved on together through the
sinuous ways of the garden, flooded with the scent of hawthorns and
lilacs, towards the open tent crowded with folk at the farther end,
there leapt in both the same intoxicating sense of youth and strength,
the same foreboding of passion, half restlessness, and half
enchantment....
“I looked for you everywhere,” said Sorell, as he made his way to
Constance through the crowd of departing guests in the college gateway.
“Where did you hide yourself? The Lord Chancellor was sad not to say
good-bye to you.”
Constance summoned an answering tone of regret.
“How good of him! I was only exploring the garden—with Mr. Falloden.”
At the name, there was a quick and stiffening change in Sorell’s face.
“You knew him before? Yes—he told me. A queer fellow—very able. They
say he’ll get his First. Well—we shall meet at the Eights and then
we’ll make plans. Goodnight.”
He smiled on her, and went his way, ruminating uncomfortably as he
walked back to his college along the empty midnight streets. Falloden?
It was to be hoped there was nothing in that! How Ella Risborough would
have detested the type! But there was much that was not her mother in
the daughter. He vowed to himself that he would do his small best to
watch over Ella Risborough’s child.
There was little or no conversation in the four-wheeler that bore the
Hooper party home. Mrs. Hooper and Alice were stiffly silent, while the
Reader chaffed Constance a little about her successes of the evening.
But he, too, was sleepy and tired, and the talk dropped. As they
lighted their bedroom candles in the hall, Mrs. Hooper said to her
niece, in her thin, high tone, mincing and coldly polite:
“I think it would have been better, Constance, if you had told us you
knew Lord Glaramara. I don’t wish to find fault, but such—such
concealments—are really very awkward!”
Constance opened her eyes. She could have defended herself easily. She
had no idea that her aunt was unaware of the old friendship between her
parents and Lord Glaramara, who was no more interesting to her
personally than many others of their Roman _habitués_, of whom the
world was full. But she was too preoccupied to spend any but the
shortest words on such a silly thing.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Ellen. I really didn’t understand.”
And she went up to bed, thinking only of Falloden; while Alice followed
her, her small face pinched and weary, her girlish mind full of pain.