To return to Strachan-Davidson, the appreciative notice printed in _The

Times_ of March 29 says that when he and his friends were disappointed

at his being passed over for the Mastership of Balliol on Jowett’s death

in 1893 he bore it ‘like an angel.’ The expression is by no means too

strong; whatever were his personal feelings, he sank them altogether in

the interest of the College he loved, and devoted all his energies to

help to make Dr. Caird’s Mastership a success. He was incapable of envy,

jealousy, or huffiness, and on the two occasions when I met him and Caird

together he showed his fine appreciation of his old friend’s character

and seemed to delight to do him honour. The first was that of our Balliol

dinner in July 1898, when, for the only time in our half-century of

existence, we entertained a guest in the person of our Master, Caird,

who was brought and introduced by Strachan-Davidson. A notable gathering

it was, under the presidency of Sir Courtenay Ilbert, twenty-six being

present out of a possible thirty-one, three of the five absentees being

ill, one in India, and one in Norway. The second was that memorable

gathering in the Hall of the old College when we celebrated Lord

Newlands’ princely gift; and fathers and sons met under the presidency of

Caird.

Jowett, great man as he was, did not show a like spirit when Scott was

appointed to the place he coveted, and thought he had earned Achilles

sulked in his tent and chuckled over the difficulties of his predecessor

as long as his reign continued. Certainly Scott, although ever a kindly

and courteous gentleman, was rather a figurehead, and had no great

influence in the College. There was a story of him—I will not vouch for

its truth—that on a well-remembered occasion somewhere about 1865, when

three undergraduates, two of them exhibitioners and distinguished and

influential scholars, came to him to announce their conversion to Rome,

he thought for a moment and then said ‘Have you considered, gentlemen,

that the rash step you propose is not merely calculated to imperil your

immortal souls, but also to do a great deal of harm to the College?’

Neither of these considerations availed to alter their determination, but

the College, which now has many Roman Catholics among its fellows and

members, still seems to manage to keep up its reputation, and maintains

its high position. I give the story, but do not credit it. Scott,

although inclined to be pompous, had a strong sense of humour, as I may

evidence by his celebrated charade on ‘Toast-Rack,’ which I give from

memory:

‘My first is found where wit and wine

Combine to grace the festive board;

My next, where captive wretches pine

In dungeons of some tyrant Lord.

My whole, alas! contains the doomed;

Twice tried by fire, ere once consumed.’

Many solvers have puzzled over the last line; and yet nothing could more

accurately describe a slice of bread toasted on both sides and then eaten.

I think that the thing which struck me most by way of contrast between

the Balliol of my own time and the same College when my dear son Alfred

was there, and Strachan-Davidson, although not yet Master, was its

ruling spirit, was the comradeship and real intimacy and affection which

subsisted between the so-called Dons and the undergraduates. Their

relations were more like those of elder and younger brothers of the same

family than those of tutors and pupils. I remember one occasion when

my son was confined to bed with a complication which proved slight,

but might have been dangerous. I was written to, and hastened to the

bedside, where I found Strachan-Davidson sitting and helping to wile away

the irksomeness of the enforced confinement with his bright smile and

cheerful flow of conversation and anecdote. I afterwards found that this

incident was typical of the relations which subsisted between tutors and

undergraduates. My boy always spoke of them with no want of respect, but

with all the intimacy and frankness bred by understanding companionship,

and he and all his contemporaries, after leaving, voluntarily contributed

to the fund so nobly headed by Lord Newlands to increase the inadequate

endowment of the College. Perhaps I may be pardoned a reference rather

personal to myself, but I cannot forget that my last communication from

the Master was a most touching and sympathetic letter when that beloved

son fell at the head of his company on the blood-stained field of Loos.

‘Another name,’ wrote Strachan-Davidson, ‘on the list of honour on the

Chapel door; no College gathering will ever be the same without our

beloved “Tortoise”’; and with his dear words of sympathy he enclosed the

prayer used daily at the College services, a model form of thanksgiving

and intercession in which I seem to trace his inspiring spirit of lofty

courage and resignation:

‘O God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, we

give Thee thanks for our brethren the members of this College who have

willingly offered themselves, and have laid down their lives for us and

for our country, and for the liberty of the world. Give us grace to

follow their good example, that we may never lose heart, but may bear

with patience and courage, as these have done, whatever Thy Providence

calls upon us to endure. Comfort the bereaved, and grant to all of us

that our afflictions may purify our hearts and minds to Thy glory.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

The Dons of my time were a distinguished body enough, brilliant scholars,

kindly and sympathetic advisers, and inspiring and ardent teachers. No

one could lightly underrate such men as ‘Jimmy’ Riddell, Edwin Palmer,

Henry Smith, Green, Newman, and the great Jowett. With the last I

was never brought personally much into contact, as, conscious of my

deficiencies in the requirements for success as a classical scholar, I

took the earliest opportunity of transferring my energies to the Law

and History School, in which I saw more prospect of success. But I

shall never cease to be grateful to him for a piece of advice which he

gave me when looking over those weekly essays which were about the most

useful part of our ordinary College education. He smiled rather grimly

at some turgid and high-flown sentences of which I was inclined to be

particularly proud, and suggested that my composition would be improved

if I struck out any passage which I was inclined to think particularly

fine. I have ever since taken his advice to heart with great advantage,

making it a rule, when revising, to apply the pruning knife unsparingly

to ‘purple patches.’ Young authors, please copy! But whatever my

gratitude may be to my teachers and masters—and I certainly owe my

‘First’ in the Final Schools to the inspiring History Lectures of Newman;

his grasp of essentials and power of connoting the relations of cause and

effect, in various movements, historical, political and philosophical,

and imparting his views and their reasons to his disciples—there was

never the frank companionship and confident and equal intercourse which

I admired so much in the Balliol of Strachan-Davidson. Perhaps the

difference should be ascribed to the times rather than to the persons.

The relations between children and parents, and between husbands and

wives, have likewise greatly altered during the half-century.

Another member of our dining club with whom I was very intimate at

Balliol was Jersey, seventh Earl, born in the same year as myself, and

my contemporary both there and at Eton. At school I did not see a great

deal of him, as, although he was in the lower division of the fifth

form at the same time as myself, he was not in the same house, and had

a different tutor. Two things, however, I especially remember about his

time at Eton; I heard what was practically his funeral sermon preached!

and afterwards saw him win the open mile race. His illness was so severe

that the master who was preaching in chapel told us that he wished we

were all as ready to face our end as the young companion just about

to leave us. It was a rash prophecy, but certainly no one would have

expected that the weak-lunged lad was destined to accomplish his seventy

years, to shine as an athlete, and to enjoy exceptionally good health

almost to the end of his strenuous labours in every kind of public and

domestic usefulness. Paymaster-General, Governor of New South Wales,

Lord Lieutenant of his County, President of the Royal Agricultural

Society, and last, not least, first unpaid Chairman of the Light Railway

Commission—in each of these varied spheres of activity he won golden

opinions from all who had to do with him. By an odd coincidence I

succeeded him in the last capacity, and my brother Commissioners, Colonel

Boughey, and Henry Steward, the first Secretary of the Commission, are

never weary of singing the praises of the ideal Chairman who gave so

much of his valuable time and energy to striving to make Mr. Ritchie’s

Light Railway Act a success. For causes which it would be foreign to my

present purpose to dwell upon here, the work of the Commission has been

light of recent years, but when Jersey first undertook the Chairmanship,

he and his colleagues held hundreds of inquiries, travelled thousands of

miles, and laid down principles and adopted methods which have stood all

tests for twenty years. I have had many opportunities of ascertaining the

views of those counsel and solicitors, engineers, local authorities and

private individuals, who come before the Commission to promote or oppose

Light Railway Orders, and one and all echo the praises of my colleagues.

But when writing of Balliol my thoughts of Jersey rather go back to those

last six months of my undergraduate life in 1867 when I was reading hard

for my class, and used to walk or run round the ‘Parks,’ then ploughed

fields, with him every morning before breakfast, and start my five

hours’ morning work at nine invigorated and refreshed. I also had many

long walks with him, and I particularly remember a Sunday walk I took

with him to Henley, when we covered the distance of some twenty miles

at an average rate of four-and-a-quarter miles an hour. He was always a

good ‘stayer,’ and used to come with a tremendous spurt at the end of a

long-distance race. He carried away all the honours for distances from

four miles to one at his own University, but had to yield pride of place

in the mile to Lawes, and in the four-mile race to the late Viscount

Alverstone in the first Inter-University contest held at Cambridge. He

also comes into my own début on the running path. My College instituted

a half-mile handicap race, for which nearly everyone entered, myself

included. I was given seventy yards start, and, being chaffed by a

friend, took the odds he offered against me of £150 to £7, and when I

began to train it was found that I could do the course in a much shorter

time than most of those handicapped as favourably as myself. Jersey of

course was scratch, but I was not much afraid of him, as I thought that

with thirty-seven starters he would find a difficulty in getting through

his horses. On the memorable day I was in good condition and rather a

hot favourite, and might have hedged my wager on favourable terms, but

I preferred ‘to put my fortune to the touch, to win or lose it all.’ I

started at a great pace and kept the lead till nearly the end, when a

dark horse, by name Garrett, an Australian, who had received sixty-five

yards start, only five yards less than myself, caught me up and beat me.

Jersey came with his usual rush at the end, and just got before me on

the post, but I think I might have saved the second place had I known he

was so near. Garrett afterwards turned out to be quite a good runner,

taking the second prize in the open quarter-mile and long hurdles. In

the following year I won the event pretty easily, although I had not been

quite so generously treated by the handicapper, but I had no big gamble

upon the event. I still have the silver-mounted claret jug I won on that

occasion, and value it as the only trophy of success on the running path.

Jersey might have filled a plate chest with the prizes he carried away.

What shall I say of Lansdowne, Viceroy of India, Governor of Canada,

Leader of the Conservative party in the House of Lords, and distinguished

in many more public capacities? The world knows his fame as a statesman,

but I can tell them something of his ability as a cook. He taught me to

make excellent omelettes, an accomplishment which has stood me in good

stead at many camps and picnics. We were in the same division at Eton,

and I was second to him in Collections the half I left Eton, when we were

both ‘up to’ Joynes, afterwards Lower Master. Boy and man, he always had

the same refined and genial manners, without the least trace of ‘side’ or

conceit. One interest we shared in common was a love of fishing, and when

I was writing my volume on the Salmon for the ‘Fur, Feather, and Fin’

series he lent me the account of his doings on the Cascapedia River, in

Canada, for the four years when he was Governor-General of the Province.

My mouth waters as I glance over the figures for the four years: 1245

salmon, weighing 29,188 lb.; 210 fish over 30 lb. The largest fish 35 lb.

Sir William Anson, who died somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly just

before our last Balliol dinner, making a sadly conspicuous gap in our

narrowing circle, was one of my oldest and most valued friends. We saw a

great deal of one another from our boyhood onwards. We went up to Eton at

the same time, and were neighbours at home in Kent. There was a half-way

house where we frequently met: Bedgbury, the hospitable seat of Alexander

Beresford-Hope, the Member of Parliament and Privy Councillor, whose

criticism of the ‘Caucasian Mystery’ invited Disraeli’s retort about his

‘Batavian grace.’ Anson was a great favourite with Lady Mildred, who had

much of the ability and sarcastic humour of her brother Lord Salisbury,

whom she greatly resembled also in personal appearance. After Eton, we

were contemporaries at Balliol, where we matriculated on the same day,

although I, being nearly two years younger, did not actually come up

till a term later. I was a candidate for the All Souls Fellowship on the

occasion when he and the present Lord Justice Phillimore were elected

on the foundation over which he afterwards presided with such eminent

success, and shortly afterward was a fellow pupil with him of the great

Thomas Chitty, the pleader, in whose chambers so many sucking lawyers

destined to become great legal luminaries, from Lord Chancellor Cairns

to A. L. Smith, Master of the Rolls, learnt the elements of pleading

before the Common Law Procedure Act put a final end to declarations

and demurrers. We were a merry as well as an industrious party, and I

remember a game of cricket in which Anson took part, played with two

volumes of Blackburn and Ellis for bat and wicket, and some crumpled

sheets of draft paper for a ball. Even the long-suffering Chitty sent up

his clerk to request us to make a little less noise.

I should not omit some notice of the part taken by Anson when at Eton

in the foundation of the ‘Eton Observer,’ a magazine conducted by a

committee of editors which numbered among its members Vincent Stuckey

Coles, now the beloved head of Pusey House, and John Andrew Doyle,

afterwards fellow of All Souls and historian. It had quite a long life

for such a venture, and contained some very promising productions,

notably the easy and flowing verse of Vincent Cracroft Amcotts, who was

afterwards also our friend and contemporary at Balliol: the dramatist

of the ‘Shooting Stars,’ an amateur dramatic club, which performed very

successfully operettas founded upon Meilhac and Halévy’s librettos with

Offenbach’s music. ‘Helen, or Taken from the Greek’ (‘La Belle Hélène’),

and ‘Lalla Rookh,’ which adapted the story of Moore’s poem to the music

of ‘Orphée aux Enfers,’ were the most notable of these compositions; in

the latter, Anson, always an admirable amateur actor, took the part of

Fadladeen, first the hostile critic, and afterwards the ardent admirer

of the disguised prince and poet. I have photographs of him in character

among the faded portraits of College contemporaries, which call up many

memories when I glance at my old album. Amcotts died young, or he might

have emulated the literary fame of his Balliol friend, Andrew Lang, or of

his St. John’s contemporary, H. D. Traill, who when at Oxford was, like

himself, a successful librettist and actor.

The ‘Eton Observer’ differed from such predecessors as Canning’s

‘Microcosm’ and Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s ‘Etonian’ by being started and

conducted by boys comparatively low down in the School, two years before

they reached the glories of Sixth Form. The irate ‘Swells’ assailed it

both in prose and verse, comparing the ambitious editors to the frog in

the fable who tried to make himself a bull! This roused the wrath of that

kind and popular house master ‘Billy Johnson,’ himself to be celebrated

as a poet later under his better known name of William Cory, the author

of ‘Ionica,’ and he fulminated against the critics in the following

impromptu epigram, which somehow still sticks in my memory:

‘The frog in the fable’s a thorough impostor!

No one can write verse but a sixth form prepostor.

The frog in the fable; we know what that means,

A priggish, impertinent usher in teens.’

When we were both called to the Bar, Anson and I went the old Home

Circuit and the Kent Sessions together for some years and during the

Assize fortnight at Croydon, where in those days important London causes

were tried and the provincial town was full of big merchants and City

solicitors, we were more than once guests of the Daniells at Fairchilds,

their beautiful country place outside the town. John Daniell, our host,

was married to Katherine Bradshaw, a cousin of my mother, who still

retained much of the beauty and charm which earlier had inspired some

characteristic lines of Tennyson; I may be pardoned for quoting them, as

I do not think they have ever yet found their way into print:

‘Because she bore the iron name

Of him who doomed the King to die,

I dreamt her one of stately frame

With look to awe the passer-by,

But found a maiden tender, shy,

With soft blue eyes and winning, sweet,

And longed to kiss her hand and lie

A thousand summers at her feet.’

One day Katherine Bradshaw, driving with her mother and Alfred Tennyson,

looked at her watch. ‘Don’t do that,’ said the Poet; ‘if it looks at you

it will stop!’

She was as clever and delightful as she was beautiful, and those were

happy days when we lounged in the summer evening in that beautiful

garden, so near and seeming so far from the ‘fumum et opus strepitumque’

of the noisy Courts we had just left. Her children, who still live

there, gathered round us while we read or recited poetry. I can remember

Alfred Thesiger’s rendering of Tennyson’s ‘Gardener’s Daughter,’ all its

vivid nature touches appealing the more to us because we were camped

where ‘the cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade,’ ‘the voices of

the well-contented doves’ forming a fit accompaniment to the musical

lines. I think the presence of her brother Henry Bradshaw, the beloved

Cambridge Librarian, who much resembled his sister, added a charm which

those of his friends who are still living will recall with gratitude

and affection. The tragedy which burst like a thunder-cloud upon this

peaceful holiday group fell with its full weight upon Willie Anson.

I shall never forget that day in August 1873 when a messenger of ill

tidings broke in upon us with the news of the terrible accident at Wigan

which wrecked the carriage in which Sir John Anson and his two daughters

were travelling north, killing him instantly. The calamity touched me the

more closely as the father and sisters were on their way to Poltalloch,

where I was myself shortly due for one of those happy ‘Autumns in

Argyllshire’ which had already begun.

Our friendship remained unbroken, and we had many happy meetings,

although Anson drifted away from the Bar into other spheres of greater

usefulness. I was more than once his guest at All Souls, where the two

sisters who happily escaped from the accident which robbed him of a

father made ideal hostesses. He was hardly ever absent from our Balliol

dinner in the Match week, and was President in 1884 and 1907. Another

bond of union arose between us when he became a fellow director of the

old Law Life Assurance Society, where we had many happy weekly Wednesday

gatherings until that ancient and successful institution allowed its

existence to be absorbed by and renewed in the Phœnix. Balliol was

strongly represented on the Board, which numbered among its eight

Barrister Directors my brother-in-law, W. R. Malcolm, the doyen of

Coutts’ Bank, Sir Henry Graham, Anson, and myself.

As the youngest member of the Club I formed a link with a somewhat junior

generation of Balliol men who added a Lord Chancellor, a Lord Justice of

Appeal, and a Judge of the High Court to this notable list. I remember

how we welcomed ‘Bob’ Reid, prince of scholars, cricketers, and athletes,

when, much to the disgust of the President of Magdalen, he flung up his

demyship at that College to compete for the open scholarship at Balliol,

which he gained with the greatest ease. He came up from Cheltenham with

a high reputation for running, among his Crichton-like gifts, but never

competed in the University or College sports. Once at least he kept

wicket for the University at Lord’s, and his career as a scholar gave

promise of the eminence he afterwards attained in the profession over

which he presided on the woolsack as Lord Loreburn. He only once competed

for a fellowship, and when he did not obtain the success to which he

believed he was entitled on the merits, his strong and firm, some would

say obstinate, character forbade him to become candidate for another

College, though doubtless many Common Rooms would have welcomed such an

addition to their numbers.

Bargrave Deane, the Judge of the Probate and Divorce Court, was then and

is still one of my most valued friends. He was a fine cricketer, having

played in the Winchester Eleven before he came up to the University,

and although he never got his ‘blue’ he was a most useful member of the

College team, and often played in University matches, though not at

Lord’s. He also rowed in his College Eight, and was an officer of the

Oxford Volunteers, as he was later in the Devil’s Own, of which I think

he was for some time colonel. He was a magnificent rifle shot, and showed

equal skill in the forest and at the competitions at Wimbledon—it was

before the days of Bisley. His father, the Queen’s Advocate, Sir James

Parker Deane, used to take a moor in Scotland, where I was privileged to

share the sport; I remember seeing Bargrave bring down with a rifle a

grand roebuck, running away from him at a long range, and how I envied

and admired his skill. He was a fine fisherman, and not only cast a

beautiful line, but made flies for salmon and sea-trout as well as he

used them. Farwell, the late Lord Justice of Appeal, I did not know so

well, but he was much looked up to and respected when at Balliol, and

was very popular throughout his long and successful career at the Bar

and on the Bench. Of Lansdowne, as Viceroy of India, Governor of Canada,

statesman and politician, I need say nothing. Here I think rather of the

boy who was with me at Eton. He was a great favourite with Jowett, who

early recognised his outstanding ability and promise.

Since my time many Balliol undergraduates of intermediate generations

have risen to high positions. To-day we boast of the Prime Minister,

the Speaker, and Earl Curzon, Chancellor of the University, to name

only three of the most important. But at this time of our national

need I prefer to dwell upon that noble band who have willingly offered

themselves in their country’s service. By October 1915 no less than

fifty-four members of my old College had already given their lives in

the War; two had gained the Victoria Cross, three the Distinguished

Service Order, eight the Military Cross, one corporal (now a Captain)

the Distinguished Conduct Medal, while twenty had been mentioned in

despatches, and three had gained foreign Orders. To-day the empty halls

and lecture rooms bear even more eloquent witness than they did when full

to overflowing to the debt England owes to my beloved College.

_LADY CONNIE._

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.

Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America.

CHAPTER XVIII.

On the day following Constance’s visit to the Boar’s Hill cottage she

wrote to Radowitz:—

‘DEAR OTTO,—I am going to ask you not to raise the subject you

spoke of yesterday to me again between us. I am afraid I should

find my visits a pain instead of a joy, if you did so. And Mrs.

Mulholland and I want to come so much—sometimes alone, and

sometimes together. We want to be mother and sister as much as

we can and you will let us! We know very well that we are poor

painted things compared with real mothers and sisters. Still we

should love to do our best—_I_ should—if you’ll let me!’

To which Otto replied:—

‘DEAR CONSTANCE,—(That’s impudence, but you told me!) I’ll

hold my tongue—though I warn you I shall only think the more.

But you shan’t have any cause to punish me by not coming. Good

Heavens!—if you didn’t come!

‘The coast is always clear here between two and four. I get my

walk in the morning.’

Two or three days a week, accordingly, Constance or Mrs. Mulholland or

both took their way to the cottage. They did all that women with soft

hearts can do for a sick man. Mrs. Mulholland managed the servants, and

inquired into the food. Connie brought books and flowers, and all the

Oxford gossip she could collect. Their visit was the brightness of the

boy’s day, and, thanks to them, many efforts were made to soften his

calamity. The best musical talent that Oxford could furnish was eager to

serve him; and a well-known orchestra was only waiting for the completion

of his symphony and the result of his examination to produce the symphony

in the hall of Marmion.

Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden—except in connection either

with Otto’s health, or with the ‘Orpheus,’ as to which Falloden was in

constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living

in a garret on the heights of Montmartre; while Constance herself was

carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her

parents, in Paris, with regard to the ‘records’ which were to make the

repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano—or piano-player,—which some

years later became the pianola, was in those days slowly developing.

The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact that the

piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for anything

more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided by the

rolls; while, in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation, as

given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in the

cylinders. For the Orpheus, the precursor, also, of types that have since

been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism, and the

audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to Schumann or

Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment, without any

intervening personality.

These things are very familiar to our generation. In the early eighties

they were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden’s lavish

expenditure was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.

But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady

Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made

others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and

flirted and talked, when at eighteen she had spent a happy spring with

her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers

to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto’s story as told by her

vivacious letters had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could

have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate

accident in a College frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself,

as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of

musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto’s father and mother

and the musical promise of the fair-haired boy. The Polish colony in

Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland’s exodus under the

revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed

to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication

with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young

Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his renderings

of Chopin’s finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie’s

dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of

folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most characteristic utterance of

a martyred people.

‘They are songs, _chère petite_,’ wrote the old man—‘of revolt,

of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them

in the world, just as there is no history in the world like

Poland’s. Your poor friend knows them all—has known them all

from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country.

He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White

Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the

southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests

of Lithuania. It is in these songs, _chère Miladi_, that we

Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country.

Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that

is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. _Hinc

surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is

in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He

has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!—but

he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive.

Let him work still for music and for Poland,—they will some day

reward him!’

And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into

fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series

of variations on the lovely theme of the ‘Heynal’—that traditional

horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of

Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and Constance

corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which

had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion.

Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance

and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did

guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which at the

beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest,

gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he found the

advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked

eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed

himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the small

matters of daily life bearing on Otto’s health and comfort, and when the

business was done Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable and even humble as he might appear in these

affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both

Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their

experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—simply this—that

whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps

unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and

protecting power of Otto’s life.

How he did it remained obscure. But Mrs. Mulholland at least—out of a

rich moral history—guessed that what they saw in the Boar’s Hill cottage

was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—that there is a

yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power. It seemed to

her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued

excitement, produced by this strange realisation that he and his life

had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training

and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer

counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden might—through

him—escape the burden of his own remorse. The hard, strong, able man, so

much older than himself in character, if not in years, the man who had

bullied and despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in

which Christ was the ‘servant’ of His brethren. Not with any conscious

Christian intention—far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious

compulsion. The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where

Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden’s

portion. A bad or a good night—appetite or no appetite—a book that Otto

liked—a visit that amused him—anything that for the moment contented

the starved musical sense in Otto, that brought out his gift, and his

joy in it—anything that, for the moment, enabled him to forget and

evade his injuries—these became, for Falloden also, the leading events

of his own day. He was reading hard for his Fellowship, and satisfying

various obscure needs by taking as much violent exercise as possible; but

there was going on in him, all the time, an intense spiritual ferment,

connected with Constance Bledlow on the one side, and Otto Radowitz on

the other.

Meanwhile—what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer—Otto was

more than willing—he burned—to play his part. All that is mystical and

passionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic had been stirred in him by

his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the bitterness of

his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart towards Falloden.

‘My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be

a great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance

happy! She shall talk of me to her children. And I shall watch over

her—perhaps—from another world.’

These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through

the boy’s mind; and he wove them into the symphony he was writing.

Tragedy, passion, melody,—these have been the Polish heritage in music;

they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of a

Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with the

melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again through

the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his foreboding

of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his creative

gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the shaping of two

lives—Falloden’s and Connie’s.

* * * * *

And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that comes

of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her spoilt-child

airs; and the bower-bird adornments with which she had filled her little

room in Medburn Hall had been gradually cleared away, to Nora’s great

annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora’s own. Amid the misty

Oxford streets and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms, she was played upon by

the unseen influences of that ‘august place,’ where both the great and

the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping the life of the present.

In those days Oxford was still praising ‘famous men, and the fathers who

begat’ her. Their shades still walked her streets. Pusey was not long

dead. Newman, the mere ghost of himself, had just preached a tremulous

last sermon within her bounds, returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus

for a few passing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the

most adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face,

and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice

ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his

Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and

could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ

Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great

feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a

generation before.

In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white

hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the surges

on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary’s the beautiful

presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires burning in

pious hearts.

And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and

deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it

would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford. Groups

of girl graduates in growing numbers went shyly through the streets,

knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this hitherto

closed world—made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes upon

them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford were

behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women how

to administer—how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to them;

some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there were

persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this

new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them in the

House of Life.

Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a

thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora’s lead

she had begun to make friends among the women-students, and to find her

way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea-time. They all seemed to

her superhumanly clever, and superhumanly modest. She had been brought up

indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and appalled her. How

they were ever passed she could not imagine. She looked at the girls who

had passed them with awe, quite unconscious the while of the glamour she

herself possessed for these untravelled students—as one familiar from

her childhood with the sacred places of history—Rome, Athens, Florence,

Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had trodden; and quiet eyes—sometimes

spectacled—would flame, while her easy talk ran on.

But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep

down.

‘Do they never think about a _man_?’ some voice in her seemed to be

asking. ‘As for me, I am always thinking about a man!’ And the colour

would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of tea.

Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently

beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early

manuscript, worth a king’s ransom. Nora got sevenpence a ‘folio,’ of

seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for so

much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure in the

small cheque she received at the end of term from the University Press

than Connie in her quarterly dividends.

But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly absorbed

in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to go home

to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the Broad, his

master’s gown floating behind him. And he would turn his fine ascetic

face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the other side of the

street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,—soft, quick, malicious—of

which Nora was well aware.

But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed

with great discretion, though with an impetuous will. She herself had

withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending some

English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought the

battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes she

would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he would

look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to say—‘Was

this what I bargained for?’

But she always laughed and went. And presently, as she crossed the hall

again and heard animated voices in the schoolroom, her brown eyes would

show a merry satisfaction.

Meanwhile Nora was growing thinner and handsomer day by day. She was

shedding awkwardness without any loss of that subacid sincerity that was

her charm. Connie, as much as she dared, took her dressing in hand. She

was never allowed to give a thing; but Annette’s fingers were quick and

clever, and Nora’s Spartan garb was sometimes transformed by them under

the orders of a coaxing or audacious Constance. The mere lifting of the

load of care had let the young plant shoot, so that many persons passing

Ewen Hooper’s second daughter in the street would turn round now to look

at her in surprise. Was that really the stout, podgy schoolgirl, who had

already, by virtue of her strong personality, made a certain impression

in the university town? People had been vaguely sorry for her, or vaguely

thought of her as plain but good. Alice, of course, was pretty; Nora

had the virtues. And now here she was, bursting into good looks, more

positive than her sister’s.

The girl’s heart indeed was young at last. For the neighbourhood of

Connie was infectious. The fairy-godmothering of that young woman was

going finely. It was the secret hope at the centre of her own life which

was playing like captured sunshine upon all the persons about her. Her

energy was prodigious. Everything to do with money-matters had been

practically settled between her and Sorell and Uncle Ewen; and settled

in Connie’s way, expressed, no doubt, in business form. And now she was

insisting firmly on the New Year visit to Rome, in spite of many protests

from Uncle Ewen and Nora. It was a promise, she declared. They should be

let off Athens, if they chose, but Rome—Rome—was their fate. She wrote

endless letters, inquiring for rooms, and announcing their coming to her

old friends. Uncle Ewen soon had the startled impression that all Rome

was waiting for them, and that they could never live up to it.

Finally, Connie persuaded them to settle on rooms in a well-known small

hotel, overlooking the garden-front of the Palazzo Barberini, where

she had grown up. She wrote to the innkeeper, Signor B., ‘a _very_ old

friend of mine,’ who replied that the ‘amici’ of the ‘distintissima

signorina’ should be most tenderly looked after. As for the Contessas and

Marchesas who wrote, eagerly promising their ‘dearest Constance’ that

they would be kind to her relations, they were many; and when Ewen Hooper

said nervously that it was clear he must take out both a frock-coat

and dress-clothes, Constance laughed and said, ‘Not at all! Signor B.

will lend you anything you want,’—a remark which, in the ears of the

travellers to be, threw new and unexpected light on the functions of an

Italian innkeeper. Meanwhile she piled up guide-books, she gathered maps;

and she taught both her uncle and Nora Italian. And so long as she was

busied with such matters she seemed the gayest of creatures, and would go

singing and laughing about the house.

In another old house in Oxford, too, her coming made delight. She spent

many winter hours beside the Master of Beaumont’s fire, gathering fresh

light on the ways of scholarship and scholars. The quarrels of the

learned had never hitherto come her way. Her father had never quarrelled

with anybody. But the Master—poor great man!—had quarrelled with so

many people! He had missed promotions which should have been his; he

had made discoveries of which others had got the credit; and he kept a

quite amazing stock of hatreds in some pocket of his vast intelligence.

Constance would listen at first to the expression of them in an awed

silence. Was it possible the world contained such mean and treacherous

monsters? And why did it matter so much to a man who knew everything?—who

held all the classics and all the Renaissance in the hollow of his

hand, to whom ‘Latin was no more difficile Than to a blackbird ’tis to

whistle’? Then, gradually, she began to have the courage to laugh; to try

a little soft teasing of her new friend and mentor, who was at once so

wonderful and so absurd. And the Master bore it well, could indeed never

have too much of her company; while his white-haired sister beamed at the

sight of her. She became the child of a childless house, and when Lady

Langmoor sent her peremptory invitations to this or that country mansion

where she would meet ‘some charming young men,’ Connie would reply—‘Best

thanks, dear Aunt Langmoor—but I am very happy here—and comfortably

in love with a gentleman on the sunny side of seventy. Please don’t

interfere!’

Only with Herbert Pryce was she ever thorny in these days. She could not

forgive him that it was not till his appointment at the Conservative

Central Office, due to Lord Glaramara’s influence, was actually signed

and sealed, that he proposed to Alice. Till the goods had been delivered,

he never finally committed himself. Even Nora had underrated his

prudence. But at last one evening he arrived at Medburn Hall after dinner

with the look of one whose mind is magnificently made up. By common

consent, the drawing-room was abandoned to him and Alice, and when they

emerged, Alice held her head triumphantly, and her lover was all jocosity

and self-satisfaction.

‘She really is a dear little thing,’ he said complacently to Connie, when

the news had been told, and excitement subsided. ‘We shall do capitally.’

‘_Enfin?_’ said Connie, with the old laugh in her eyes. ‘You are quite

sure?’

He looked at her uneasily.

‘It never does to hurry these things,’ he said, rather pompously. ‘I

wanted to feel I could give her what she had a right to expect. We owe

you a great deal, Lady Constance—or—perhaps now—I may call you Constance?’

Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice’s

sake she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs.

Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and

possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle

of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law

as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd

eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an

inferior race.

Not even to Nora—only to Mrs. Mulholland—did Constance ever lift the veil

during these months. She was not long in succumbing to the queer charm

of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little drawing-room in

St. Giles the girl of twenty would spend winter evenings, at the feet of

her new friend, passing through various stages of confession; till one

night Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face, with her own large hand, and

looked mockingly into the brown eyes:

‘Out with it, my dear!—You are in love with Douglas Falloden!’

Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did her

eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.

The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring

country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high midsummer

pomps it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding

street—on some football ground in the Parks—in the gallery of St. Mary’s

on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall figure

and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young life. They

meant far more to passion than her occasional meetings with Falloden at

the Boar’s Hill cottage. And there were other points of contact. At the

end of November, for instance, came the Merton Fellowship. Falloden won

it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived to know all she wanted

to know as to his papers and his rivals. After the announcement of his

success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed herself to send him a

little note of congratulation—very short and almost formal. He replied in

the same tone.

Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the

condition of the ‘Orpheus,’ and to arrange for its transport to England.

He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in

Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room

when he was announced, and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away.

She sat listening to the conversation.

Was this really Douglas Falloden—this grave, courteous man—without a

trace of the ‘blood’ upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had

been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical everyday

world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs—incredible!

He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the

cottage—the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for

Otto’s open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on—with

an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the

distance—they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then he began

on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the

back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of hair—handsomer,

thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie listening spell-bound in

a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the

dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him. Nora’s perplexed eyes

travelled from one to the other.

As to the story of the ‘Orpheus’ and its inventor, both girls hung upon

it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre,

and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors

of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons

of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby

revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with

a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain

teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the

Welt-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a

fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm

to take it up. Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of funds,

based on Radowitz’s report—itself the echo of a couple of letters from

Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor

in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was

accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should

hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.

The moment came. Wife and children gathered breathless. Chaumart turned

on the current, released the machinery.

‘Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette!’

They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its

utmost. And _nothing_ happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing

or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor, in despair, chased everybody

out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to

smash it or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he

took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as

the morning sun rose he discovered in the very heart of the creature,

to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most

elementary blunder,—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying

mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right;

and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and

called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other’s

necks—and what a _déjeuner_ in the Palais Royal—children and all—paid for

by the inventor’s last napoleon!

All this Falloden told, and told well.

Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale.

She clapped her hands in delight.

‘And when—_when_ will it come?’

‘I must go over again—but I think the first days of January will see it

here. I’ve only told you half—and the lesser half. It’s you that have

done most—far most.’

And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits he

had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the rolls

were being collected, under Chaumart’s direction. The ‘Orpheus’ already

had a large musical library of its own—renderings by some of the finest

artists of some of the noblest music. Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin,

Brahms, Schumann—all Otto’s favourite things, as far as Connie had been

able to discover them, were in the catalogue.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and

spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret

had suddenly dropped.

‘It must give him some pleasure—it _must_!’ she said, slowly, piteously,

as though she asked a question.

Falloden did not reply immediately. He rose from his seat. Nora, under a

quick impulse, gathered up a letter she had been writing, and slipped out

of the room.

‘At least—’ he looked away from her, straight out of window—‘I suppose it

will please him—that we tried to do something.’

‘How is he—really?’

He shrugged his shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand on

her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white brow,

and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so lightly. Her

childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly she lifted her

eyes.

‘I wish you knew’—it seemed to him her voice choked a little—‘how

much—you matter to him. Mrs. Mulholland and I couldn’t keep him cheerful

while you were away.’

He laughed.

‘Well, I have only just escaped a catastrophe to-day.’

She looked alarmed.

‘How?’

‘I offended Bateson, and he gave notice!’ Connie’s ‘Oh!’ was a sound of

consternation. Bateson had become a most efficient and comfortable valet,

and Otto depended greatly upon him.

‘It’s all right,’ said Falloden quickly. ‘I grovelled. I ate all the

humble-pie I could think of. It was, of course, impossible to let him go.

Otto can’t do without him. I seem somehow to have offended his dignity.’

‘They have so much!’ said Connie, laughing, but rather unsteadily.

‘One lives and learns.’ The tone of the words was serious—a little

anxious. Then the speaker took up his hat. ‘But I’m not good at managing

touchy people. Good night.’

Her hand passed into his. The little fingers were cold; he could not help

enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp. The firelit room, the dark

street outside, and the footsteps of the passers-by—they all melted from

consciousness. They only saw and heard each other.

In another minute the outer door had closed behind him. Connie was left

still in the same attitude, one hand on the chair, her head drooping, her

heart in a dream.

Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the

thoroughfares. The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit,

above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the lower

air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and domes

showed vaguely—as beautiful ‘suggestions’—‘notes’—from which all detail

had disappeared. He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up the hill

he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berkshire side, leaving the

cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to

the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch

of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied

the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest—still, patient,

expectant—rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But

Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so

near to him, and yet so far away; so sweet, yet so defensive. His whole

nature cried out fiercely for her. ‘I want her!—_I want her!_ And I

believe she wants me. She’s not afraid of me now—she turns to me. What

keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our

double happiness!’

He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then, as he saw the roof and

white walls of the cottage through the trees, his mood wavered—and fell.

There was a life there which he had injured—a life that now depended on

him. He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had

denied it to her. And he was more convinced than Otto himself—though

never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment—that the

boy was doomed—not immediately, but after one of those pitiful struggles

which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same inevitably to

one end.

‘And as long as he lives I shall look after him,’ he thought, feeling

that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled

eagerness and despair.

For how could he saddle Connie’s life with such a charge—or darken it

with such a tragedy?

Impossible! But that was only one of many reasons why he should not

take advantage of her, through their common pity for Otto. In his own

eyes he was a ruined man, and having resolutely refused to live upon

his mother, his pride was little more inclined to live upon a wife,

common, and generally applauded, though the practice might be. About

five thousand pounds had been saved for himself out of the wreck, of

which he would certainly spend a thousand, before all was done, on the

‘Orpheus.’ The rest would just suffice to launch him as a barrister. His

mother would provide for the younger children. Her best jewels, indeed,

had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nellie—who showed signs

of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint guardian

of Trix and Reggie, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now that his

mother’s soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than ever by

her widowhood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet fulfilled

them—anxiously and well—to the amazement of his relations.

In addition he had his way to make in the world.

But Constance had only to be a little more seen and known in English

Society to make the most brilliant match that any scheming chaperon could

desire. Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast developing

beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go, she would

ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in addition to what

she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly have her out of

Oxford at the earliest possible moment—and small blame to them.

In all this he reasoned as a man of his class and antecedents was likely

to reason—only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie, through

Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed to him a

mean and dishonourable thing.

If he had only time—time to make his career!

But there would be no time given him. As soon as her Risborough relations

got hold of her, Constance would marry directly.

He went back to the cottage in a sombre mood. Then, as Otto proved to be

in the same condition, Falloden had to shake off his own depression as

quickly as possible, and spend the evening in amusing and distracting the

invalid.

But Fortune, which had no doubt enjoyed the nips she had inflicted on so

tempting a victim, was as determined as before to take her own capricious

way.

By this time it was the last week of term, and a sharp frost had set in

over the Thames Valley. The floods were out north and south of the city,

and a bright winter sun shone all day over the glistening ice-plains and

the throng of skaters.

At the beginning of the frost came the news of Otto’s success in his

musical examination; and at a Convocation held shortly after it he put on

his gown as Bachelor of Music. The Convocation House was crowded to see

him admitted to his degree; and the impression produced as he made his

way through the throng towards the Vice-Chancellor, by the frail boyish

figure, the startling red-gold hair, the black sling, and the haunting

eyes, was long remembered in Oxford. Then Sorell claimed him, and hurried

him up to London for doctors and consultations, since the effort of the

examination had left him much exhausted.

Meanwhile the frost held, and all Oxford went skating. Constance

performed indifferently, and both Nora and Uncle Ewen were bent upon

improving her. But there were plenty of cavaliers to attend her, whenever

she appeared, either on Port Meadow or the Magdalen flood water; and

her sound youth delighted physically in the exercise, in the play

of the brisk air about her face, and the alternations of the bright

winter day—from the pale blue of its morning skies, hung behind the

snow-sprinkled towers and spires of Oxford, down to the red of sunset,

and the rise of those twilight mists which drew the fair city gently back

into the bosom of the moonlit dark.

But all the time the passionate sense in her watched and waited. The

‘mere living’ was good—‘yet was there better than it!’

And on the second afternoon, out of the distance of Magdalen meadow,

a man came flying towards her as it seemed on the wings of the wind.

Falloden drew up beside her, hovering on his skates, a splendid vision in

the dusk, ease and power in every look and movement.

‘Let me take you a run with the wind,’ he said, holding out his hand.

‘You shan’t come to any harm.’

Her eyes and her happy flush betrayed her. She put her hand in his,

and away they flew, up the course of the Cherwell, through the flooded

meadows. It seemed the very motion of gods; the world fell away. Then,

coming back, they saw Magdalen Tower, all silver and ebony under the

rising moon; and the noble arch of the bridge. The world was all

transmuted. Connie’s only hold on the kind common earth seemed to lie in

this strong hand to which she clung; and yet in that touch, that hold,

lay the magic that was making life anew.

But soon the wind had risen gustily, and was beating in her face,

catching at her breath.

‘This is too cold for you!’ said Falloden, abruptly; and wheeling round,

he had soon guided her into a more sheltered place, and there, easily

gliding up and down, soul and sense fused in one delight, they passed one

of those hours for which there is no measure in our dull human time. They

would not think of the past; they shrank from imagining the future. There

were shadows and ghosts behind them, and ahead of them; but the sheer

present mastered them.

Before they parted, Falloden told his companion that the ‘Orpheus’ would

arrive from Paris the following day, with a trio of French workmen to set

it up. The electric installation was already in place. Everything would

be ready by the evening. The instrument was to be placed behind a screen

in the built-out room, once a studio, which Falloden had turned into a

library. Otto rarely or never went there. The room looked north, and he,

whose well-being hung upon sunshine, disliked it. But there was no other

place for the ‘Orpheus’ in the little cottage, and Falloden, who had been

getting new and thick curtains for the windows, improving the fireplace,

and adding some arm-chairs, was eagerly hopeful that he could turn it

into a comfortable music-room for Otto in the winter evenings, while

he—if necessary—read his law elsewhere.

‘Will you come for a rehearsal to-morrow?’ he asked her. ‘Otto comes back

the day after.’

‘No, no! I won’t hear anything, not a note—till he comes! But is he

strong enough?’ she added, wistfully. Strong enough, she meant, to bear

agitation and surprise. But Falloden reported that Sorell knew everything

that was intended, and approved. Otto had been very listless and

depressed in town; a reaction, no doubt, from his spurt of work before

the Mus.Bac. exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might rouse

him, and gild the return to Oxford.

CHAPTER XIX.

‘Have some tea, old man, and warm up,’ said Falloden, on his knees before

a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to improve.

‘What do you keep such a climate for?’ growled Radowitz, as he hung

shivering over the grate.

Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously.

The bright red patches on the boy’s cheeks, and his dry, fevered look,

his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears

in the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and

felt himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the

London doctors, on the whole, had been reassuring. The slight hæmorrhage

of the summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of

active mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the

nervous shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which

had followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had

pressed hard for sunshine and open air—the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers.

But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go alone,

and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the

way. Falloden’s first Bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was

tied to St. Cyprian’s; and every other companion so far proposed had been

rejected with irritation.

Unluckily, on this day of his return, the Oxford skies had put on again

their characteristic winter gloom. The wonderful fortnight of frost and

sun was over; tempests of wind and deluges of rain were drowning it fast

in flood and thaw. The wind shrieked round the little cottage, and though

it was little more than three o’clock, darkness was coming fast.

Falloden could not keep still. Having made up the fire, he brought in a

lamp himself; he drew the curtains, then undrew them again, apparently

that he might examine a stretch of the Oxford road just visible through

the growing dark; or he wandered in and out of the room, his hands in his

pockets, whistling. Otto watched him with a vague annoyance. He himself

was horribly tired, and Falloden’s restlessness got on his nerves.

At last Falloden said abruptly, pausing in front of him:

‘You’ll have some visitors directly!’

Otto looked up. The gaiety in Falloden’s eyes informed him and at the

same time wounded him.

‘Lady Constance?’ he said, affecting indifference.

‘And Mrs. Mulholland. I believe I see their carriage.’

And Falloden, peering into the stormy twilight, opened the garden door

and passed out into the rain.

Otto remained motionless, bent over the fire. Sorell was talking with

the ex-scout in the dining-room, impressing on him certain medical

directions. Radowitz suddenly felt himself singularly forlorn and

deserted. Of course, Falloden and Constance would marry. He always

knew it. He would have served to keep them together, and give them

opportunities of meeting, when they might have easily drifted entirely

apart. He laughed to himself as he thought of Connie’s impassioned cry—‘I

shall never, never, marry him!’ Such are the vows of women. She would

marry him; and then what would he, Otto, matter to her or to Falloden any

longer? He would have been, no doubt, a useful peg and pretext; but he

was not going to intrude on their future bliss. He thought he would go

back to Paris. One might as well die there as anywhere.

There were murmurs of talk and laughter in the hall. He sat still,

hugging his melancholy. But when the door opened he rose quickly,

instinctively, and, at the sight of the girl coming in so timidly behind

Mrs. Mulholland, her eyes searching the half-lit room, and the smile, in

them and on her lips, held back till she knew whether her poor friend

could bear with smiles, Otto’s black hour began to lift. He let himself,

at least, be welcomed and petted; and when fresh tea had been brought

in, and the room was full of talk, he lay back in his chair, listening,

the deep lines in his forehead gradually relaxing. He was better, he

declared, a great deal better; in fact there was very little at all the

matter with him. His symphony was to be given at the Royal College of

Music early in the year. Everybody had been awfully decent about it. And

he had begun a nocturne that amused him. As for the doctors, he repeated

petulantly that they were all fools—it was only a question of degree. He

intended to manage his life as he pleased in spite of them.

Connie sat on a high stool near him while he talked. She seemed to be

listening, but he once or twice thought, resentfully, that it was a

perfunctory listening. He wondered what else she was thinking about.

The tea was cleared away. And presently the three others had disappeared.

Otto and Constance were left alone.

‘I have been reading so much about Poland lately,’ said Constance

suddenly. ‘Oh, Otto, some day you must show me Cracow!’

His face darkened.

‘I shall never see Cracow again. I shall never see it with you.’

‘Why not? Let’s dream!’

The smiling tenderness in her eyes angered him. She was treating him

like a child; she was so sure he never could—or never would—make love to

her!

‘I shall never go to Cracow,’ he said, with energy, ‘not even with you. I

was to have gone—a year from now. It was all arranged. We have relations

there—and I have friends there—musicians. The _chef d’orchestre_—at the

Opera House—he was one of my teachers in Paris. Before next year, I was

to have written a concerto on some of our Polish songs—there are scores

of them that Liszt and Chopin never discovered. Not love-songs, mind

you!—songs of revolution—battle-songs.’

His eyes lit up and he began to hum an air—to Polish words—that even as

given out in his small tenor voice, stirred like a trumpet.

‘Fine!’ said Constance.

‘Ah, but you can’t judge—you don’t know the words. The words are

splendid. It’s “Ujejski’s Hymn”—the Galician Hymn of ’46.’ And he fell to

intoning.

‘Amid the smoke of our homes that burn,

From the dust where our brothers lie bleeding,

Our cry goes up to Thee, oh God!’

‘There!—that’s something like it.’

And he ran on with a breathless translation of the ‘Z dymen posarow,’ the

famous dirge for the Galician rebels of ’46, in which a devastated land

wails like Rachel for her children.

Suddenly a sound—a sound reedy and clear, like a beautiful voice in the

distance.

‘Constance!’

The lad sprang to his feet. Constance laid hold on him.

‘Listen, dear Otto—listen a moment!’

She held him fast, and breathing deep, he listened. The very melody he

had just been humming rang out, from the same distant point; now pealing

through the little house in a rich plenitude of sound, now delicate and

plaintive as the chant of nuns in a quiet church, and finally crashing to

a defiant and glorious close.

‘What is it?’ he said, very pale, looking at her almost threateningly.

‘What have you been doing?’

‘It’s our gift—our surprise—dear Otto!’

‘Where is it? Let me go.’

‘No!—sit down and listen! Let me listen with you. I’ve not heard it

before! Mr. Falloden and I have been preparing it for months. Isn’t it

wonderful! Oh, dear Otto!—if you only like it!’ He sat down trembling,

and hand in hand they listened.

The ‘Fantasia’ ran on, dealing with song after song, now simply, now with

rich embroidery and caprice.

‘Who is it playing?’ said Otto, in a whisper.

‘It _was_ Paderewski!’ said Constance between laughing and crying. ‘Oh,

Otto, everybody’s been at work for it!—everybody was so marvellously

keen!’

‘In Paris?’

‘Yes—all your old friends—your teachers—and many others.’

She ran through the names. Otto choked. He knew them all, and some of

them were among the most illustrious in French music.

But while Connie was speaking the stream of sound in the distance sank

into gentleness, and in the silence a small voice arose, naïvely,

pastorally sweet, like the Shepherd’s Song in ‘Tristan.’ Otto buried his

face in his hands. It was the ‘Heynal,’ the watchman’s horn-song from

the towers of Panna Marya. Once given, a magician caught it, played with

it, pursued it, juggled with it, through a series of variations till,

finally, a grave and beautiful modulation led back to the noble dirge of

the beginning.

‘I know who wrote that!—who must have written it!’ said Otto, looking up.

He named a French name. ‘I worked with him at the Conservatoire for a

year.’

Constance nodded.

‘He did it for you,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. ‘He said you were

the best pupil he ever had.’

The door opened, and Mrs. Mulholland’s grizzled head appeared, with

Falloden and Sorell behind.

‘Otto!’ said Mrs. Mulholland, softly.

He understood that she called him, and he went with her in bewilderment,

along the passage to the studio.

Falloden came into the sitting-room and shut the door.

‘Did he like it?’ he asked, in a low voice, in which there was neither

pleasure nor triumph.

Connie, who was still sitting on the stool by the fire with her face

turned away, looked up.

‘Oh yes, yes!’ she said in a kind of desperation, wringing her hands;

‘but why are some pleasures worse than pain—much worse?’

Falloden came up to her, and stood silently, his eyes on hers.

‘You see—’ she went on, dashing tears away—‘It is not _his_ work—_his_

playing. It can’t do anything—can it?—for his poor starved _self_.’

Falloden said nothing. But she knew that he felt with her. Their scheme

seemed to be lying in ruins; they were almost ashamed of it.

Then from the further room there came to their ears a prelude of Chopin,

played surely by more than mortal fingers,—like the rustling of summer

trees, under a summer wind. And suddenly they heard Otto’s laugh—a sound

of delight.

Connie sprang up—her face transformed.

‘Did you hear that? We have—we have—given him pleasure!’

‘Yes—for an hour,’ said Falloden, hoarsely. Then he added—‘The doctors

say he ought to go south.’

‘Of course he ought!’ Connie was pacing up and down, her hands behind

her, her eyes on the ground. ‘Can’t Mr. Sorell take him?’

‘He could take him out, but he couldn’t stay. The college can’t spare

him. He feels his first duty is to the college.’

‘And you?’ She raised her eyes timidly.

‘What good should I be alone!’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I’m a pretty

sort of a nurse!’

There was a pause. Connie trembled and flushed. Then she moved forward,

both her little hands outstretched.

‘Take me with you!’ she murmured under her breath. But her eyes said

more—far more.

The next moment she was in Falloden’s arms, strained against his

breast—everything else lost and forgotten, as their lips met, in the just

selfishness of passion.

Then he released her, stepping back from her, his strong face quivering.

‘I was a mean wretch to let you do that!’ he said, with energy.

She eyed him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I have no right to let you give yourself to me—throw yourself

away on me—just because we have been doing this thing together,—because

you are sorry for Otto—and—’ his voice dropped—‘perhaps for me.’

‘_Oh!_’ It was a cry of protest. Coming nearer, she put her two hands

lightly on his shoulders—

‘Do you think—’ he saw her breath fluttering—‘do you think I should let

anyone—anyone—kiss me—like that! just because I was sorry for them—or for

someone else?’

He stood motionless beneath her touch.

‘You _are_ sorry for me—you angel!—and you’re sorry for Otto—and you want

to make up to everybody—and make everybody happy—and⸺’

‘And one can’t!’ said Connie quietly, her eyes bright with tears—‘Don’t

I know that? I repeat’—her colour was very bright—‘But perhaps you won’t

believe that—that’—then she laughed—‘_of my own free will_, I never

kissed anybody before?’

‘Constance!’ He threw his strong arms round her again. But she slipped

out of them.

‘Am I believed?’ The tone was peremptory.

Falloden stooped, lifted her hand and kissed it humbly.

‘You know you ought to marry a Duke!’ he said, trying to laugh, but with

a swelling throat.

‘Thank you—I never saw a Duke yet I wanted to marry.’

‘That’s it. You’ve seen so little. I am a pauper, and you might marry

anybody. It’s taking an unfair advantage. Don’t you see—what⸺’

‘What my aunts will think?’ asked Constance coolly—‘Oh yes, I’ve

considered all that.’

She walked away, and came back, a little pale and grave. She sat down on

the arm of a chair and looked up at him.

‘I see. You are as proud as ever.’

That hurt him. His face changed.

‘You can’t really think that,’ he said, with difficulty.

‘Yes, yes, you are!’ she said, wildly, covering her eyes a moment with

her hands. ‘It’s just the same as it was in the spring—only different—I

told you then—’

‘That I was a bully and a cad!’

Her hands dropped sharply.

‘I _didn’t_!’ she protested. But she coloured brightly as she spoke,

remembering certain remarks of Nora’s. ‘I thought—yes, I did think—you

cared too much about being rich—and a great swell—and all that. But so

did I!’ She sprang up. ‘What right had I to talk? When I think how I

patronised and looked down upon everybody!’

‘_You!_’ His tone was pure scorn. ‘You couldn’t do such a thing if you

tried for a week of Sundays.’

‘Oh couldn’t I! I _did_. Oxford seemed to me just a dear stupid old

place—out of the world,—a kind of museum—where nobody mattered. Silly,

wasn’t it? childish?’ She drew back her head fiercely, as though she

defied him to excuse her. ‘I was just amusing myself with it—and with

Otto—and with you. And that night, at Magdalen, all the time I was

dancing with Otto, I was aiming—abominably—at you! I wanted to provoke

you—to pay you back—oh, not for Otto’s sake—not at all!—but just

because—I had asked you something—and you had refused. That was what

stung me so. And do you suppose I should have cared twopence, unless⸺’

Her voice died away. Her fingers began fidgeting with the arm of the

chair, her eyes bent upon them.

He looked at her a moment irresolute, his face working. Then he said

huskily—

‘In return—for that—I’ll tell you—I must tell you the real truth about

myself. I don’t think you know me yet—and I don’t know myself. I’ve got

a great brutal force in me somewhere—that wants to brush everything—that

hinders me—or checks me—out of my path. I don’t know that I can control

it—that I can make a woman happy. It’s an awful risk for you. Look at

that poor fellow!’ He flung out his hand towards that distant room whence

came every now and then a fresh wave of music. ‘I didn’t _intend_ to do

him any bodily harm⸺’

‘Of course not! It was an accident!’ cried Connie passionately.

‘Perhaps—strictly. But I did mean somehow to crush him—to make it

precious hot for him—just because he’d got in my way. My will was like a

steel spring in a machine—that had been let go. Suppose I felt like that

again, towards⸺’

‘Towards me?’ Connie opened her eyes very wide, puckering her pretty brow.

‘Towards someone—or something—you care for. We are certain to disagree

about heaps of things.’

‘Of course we are. Quite certain!’

‘I tell you again,’ said Falloden, speaking with a strong simplicity

and sincerity that were all the time undoing the impression he honestly

desired to make—‘It’s a big risk for you—a temperament like mine—and you

ought to think it over seriously. And then’—he paused abruptly in front

of her, his hands in his pockets—‘Why should you—you’re so young!—start

life with any burden on you? Why should you? It’s preposterous! I must

look after Otto all his life.’

‘So must I!’ said Connie quickly. ‘That’s the same for both of us.’

‘No!—that’s nonsense. And then—you may forget it—but I can’t. I

repeat—I’m a pauper. I’ve lost Flood. I’ve lost everything that I could

once have given you. I’ve got about four thousand pounds left—just enough

to start me at the bar—when I’ve paid for the “Orpheus.” And I can’t take

a farthing from my mother or the other children. I should be just living

upon you. How do I know that I shall get on at the bar?’

Connie smiled; but her lips trembled.

‘Do think it over,’ he implored; and he walked away from her again, as

though to leave her free.

There was a silence. He turned—anxiously to look at her.

‘I seem’—said Connie, in a low voice that shook—‘to have kissed

somebody—for nothing.’

That was the last stroke. He came back to her, and knelt beside her,

murmuring inarticulate things. With a sigh of relief, Connie subsided

upon his shoulder, conscious through all her emotion of the dear

strangeness of the man’s coat against her cheek. But presently, she drew

herself away, and looked him in the eyes, while her own swam.

‘I love you’—she said deliberately—‘because—well, first because I love

you!—that’s the only good reason, isn’t it? and then, because you’re so

sorry. And I’m sorry too. We’ve both got to make up—we’re going to make

up all we _can_.’ Her sweet face darkened. ‘Oh Douglas, it’ll take the

two of us—and even then we can’t do it. But we’ll help each other.’

And stooping she kissed him gently, lingeringly, on the brow. It was a

kiss of consecration.

* * * * *

A few minutes more, and then, with the Eighth Prelude swaying and

dancing round them, they went hand in hand down the long approach to the

music-room.

The door was open, and they saw the persons inside. Otto and Sorell were

walking up and down smoking cigarettes. The boy was radiant, transformed.

All look of weakness had disappeared; he held himself erect; his shock

of red-gold hair blazed in the firelight, and his eyes laughed, as he

listened silently, playing with his cigarette. Sorell evidently was

thinking only of him; but he too wore a look of quiet pleasure.

Only Mrs. Mulholland sat watchful, her face turned towards the open

door. It wore an expression which was partly excitement, partly doubt.

The strings of her large mushroom hat were untied; and her ample skirts,

looped up to keep them from the mud, billowed round her. Her snow-white

hair, above her very black eyes, and her frowning, intent look, gave her

the air of an old Sibyl watching at the cave’s mouth.

But when she saw the two—the young man and the girl—coming towards her,

hand in hand, she first peered at them intently, and then, as she rose,

all the gravity of her face broke up in laughter.

‘Hope for the best, you foolish old woman!’ she said to herself—‘“Male

and female made He them!”—world without end—Amen!’

‘Well?’ She moved towards them, as they entered the room; holding out her

hands with a merry, significant gesture.

Otto and Sorell turned. Connie—crimson—threw herself on Mrs. Mulholland’s

neck and kissed her. Falloden stood behind her, thinking of a number of

things to say, and unable to say any of them.

The last soft notes of the Prelude ceased.

It was for Connie to save the situation. With a gentle, gliding step, she

went across to Otto, who had gone very white again.

‘Dear Otto, you told me I should marry Douglas, and I’m going to. That’s

one to you. But I won’t marry him—and he agrees—unless you’ll promise to

come to Algiers with us, three weeks from now. You’ll lend him to us,

won’t you?’—she turned pleadingly to Sorell—‘we’ll take such care of him.

Douglas—you may be surprised!—is going to read law at Biskra!’

Otto sank into a chair. The radiance had gone. He looked very frail and

ghostly. But he took Connie’s outstretched hand.

‘I wish you joy,’ he said, stumbling painfully over the words. ‘I do wish

you joy!—with all my heart.’

Falloden approached him. Otto looked up wistfully. Their eyes met, and

for a moment the two men were conscious only of each other.

Mrs. Mulholland moved away, smiling, but with a sob in her throat.

‘It’s like all life,’ she thought—‘love and death, side by side.’

And she remembered that comparison by a son of Oxford, of each moment, as

it passes, to a watershed—‘whence equally the seas of life and death are

fed.’

But Connie was determined to carry things off with a laugh. She sat down

beside Otto, looking business-like.

‘Douglas and I’—the name came out quite pat—‘have been discussing how

long it really takes to get married.’

Mrs. Mulholland laughed.

‘Mrs. Hooper has been enjoying Alice’s trousseau so much, you needn’t

expect she’ll let you get through yours in a hurry.’

‘It’s going to be _my_ trousseau, not Aunt Ellen’s,’ said Connie with

decision. ‘Let me see. It’s now the 18th of December. Didn’t we say the

12th of January?’ She looked lightly at Falloden.

‘Somewhere near it,’ said Falloden, his smile at last answering hers.

‘We shall want a fortnight, I suppose, to get used to each other,’ said

Connie coolly. ‘Then’—she laid a hand on Mrs. Mulholland’s knee—‘you

bring him to Marseilles to meet us?’

‘Certainly—at your orders.’

Connie looked at Otto.

‘Dear Otto?’ The soft tone pleaded. He started painfully.

‘You’re awfully good to me. But how can I come to be a burden on you?’

‘But I shall go too,’ said Mrs. Mulholland, firmly.

Connie exclaimed in triumph:

‘We four—to front the desert!—just about the time that he’—she nodded

towards Sorell—‘is showing Nora and Uncle Ewen Rome. You mayn’t know

it’—she addressed Sorell—‘but on Monday, January 24—I think I’ve got the

date right—you and they go on a picnic to Hadrian’s Villa. The weather’s

arranged for—and the carriage is ordered.’

She looked at him askance. But her colour had risen. So had his. He

looked down on her while Mrs. Mulholland and Falloden were both talking

fast to Otto.

‘You little witch!’ said Sorell in a low voice—‘what are you after now?’

Connie laughed in his face.

‘You’ll go—you’ll see!’

* * * * *

The little dinner which followed was turned into a betrothal feast.

Champagne was brought in, and Otto, madly gay, boasted of his forebears

and the incomparable greatness of Poland as usual. Nobody minded. After

dinner the magic toy in the studio discoursed Brahms and Schumann, in

the intervals of discussing plans and chattering over maps. But Connie

insisted on an early departure. ‘My guardian will have to sleep upon

it—and there’s really no time to lose.’ Everyone took care not to see

too much of the parting between her and Falloden. Then she and Mrs.

Mulholland were put into their carriage. But Sorell preferred to walk

home, and Falloden went back to Otto.

Sorell descended the hill towards Oxford. The storm was dying away,

and the now waning moon, which had shone so brilliantly over the frozen

floods a day or two before, was venturing out again among the scudding

clouds. The lights in Christ Church Hall were out, but the beautiful city

shone vaguely luminous under the night.

Sorell’s mind was full of mingled emotion—as torn and jagged as the

clouds rushing overhead. The talk and laughter in the cottage came back

to him. How hollow and vain it sounded in the spiritual ear! What could

ever make up to that poor boy who could have no more, at the most, than a

year or two to live? for the spilt wine of his life?—the rifled treasure

of his genius? And was it not true to say that his loss had made the

profit of the lovers—of whom one had been the author of it? When Falloden

and Constance believed themselves to be absorbed in Otto, were they not

really playing the great game of sex like any ordinary pair?

It was the question that Otto himself had asked—that any cynic must have

asked. But Sorell’s tender humanity passed beyond it. The injury done,

indeed, was beyond repair. But the mysterious impulse which had brought

Falloden to the help of Otto was as real in its sphere as the anguish

and the pain; aye, for the philosophic spirit, more real than they, and

fraught with a healing and disciplining power that none could measure.

Sorell admitted—half-reluctantly—the changes in life and character which

had flowed from it. He was even ready to say that the man who had proved

capable of feeling it, in spite of all past appearances, was ‘not far

from the Kingdom of God.’

* * * * *

Oxford drew nearer and nearer. Tom Tower loomed before him. Its great

bell rang out. And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there

ran through Sorell’s mind—his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to

the claims of personal happiness—the vision that Connie had so sharply

evoked; of a girl’s brown eyes and honest look—the look of a child to be

cherished, of a woman to be loved.

Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of

the _Antigone_?

‘Love, all-conquering love, that nestles in the fair cheeks of a maiden⸺’

It is perhaps not surprising that Sorell, on this occasion, after he had

entered the High, should have taken the wrong turn to St. Cyprian’s, and

woke up to find himself passing through Radcliffe Square, when he ought

to have been in the Turl.

THE END