he said when he had concluded. "I cannot but think that
as far as you can see now you have acted rightly. It is terribly hard on
you, but I will help you all I can. And perhaps, after all, the future
may prove brighter than it looks now for all of us."

CHAPTER VI.

It was the end of Term, nearly two years after that interview in
Richmond Park which, as both Vane and Enid had then believed, was for
them the parting of the ways. Vane was sitting in a deep-seated, Russian
wicker-chair in his cosy study, and opposite him, in a similar chair,
was another man with whom he had been talking somewhat earnestly for
about an hour.

To-morrow would be Commemoration Day--"Commem," to use the
undergraduate's abbreviation. There would be meetings from far and wide
of people gathered together, not only from all over the kingdom, but
from the ends of the earth as well; men and women glorying, for their
own sakes and their sons', in the long traditions of the grand old
University, the dearly-loved Alma Mater, nursing-mother of their fathers
and fathers' fathers. Here a man who had been a tutor and then a Fellow,
and was now one of His Majesty's judges; there another, who walked with
sober mien in the leggings and tunic of a Bishop, and who, in his time,
had dodged the Proctor and his bull-dogs as nimbly as the most
irresponsible undergraduate of the moment--and so on through the whole
hierarchy of the University.

The Lists were just out. Vane had fulfilled the promise of his earlier
career and had taken a brilliant double-first. He had read for Classics
and History, but he had also taken up incidentally Mental Science and
Moral Philosophy, and he had scored a first in all. If it had then been
possible for him to have had a Treble-First, it would have been his. As
it was he had won the most brilliant degree of his year--and there he
was, sitting back in his chair, blowing cloud after cloud of smoke out
of his mouth, and every now and then taking a sip out of a big cup of
tea and looking with something more than admiration at the man opposite;
a man who had only achieved a first, and who, if he had been some other
kind of man, would have been very well contented with it.

It would not, however, have needed a particularly keen student of human
nature to discover that this was not the kind of man who could rest
contented with anything like a formal success; and, after all, even a
double-first, to say nothing of a single, alth