d to kill him. I am not, in any way, sorry, except that
suddenly I do not want to die. You are the only person in the world for
whom I care; you will understand. I have not disgraced the name; it was
killing a rat. I think that you had better not come to see me. I face it
better alone. We have gone along well together, you and I. I send you my
love. Good-bye, OLVA.

As he finished it, he wondered, Would this be sent? Would they come for
him? Perhaps, at this moment, they had found the body. He put the letter
carefully in the pocket of his shirt. Then, suddenly, he was confronted
with the risk. Suppose that he were to be taken ill, to faint, to forget
the thing. . . . No, the letter must wait. They would allow him to
write, if the time came.

He took the letter, flung it into the fire, watched it burn. He felt as
though, in the writing of it, he had communicated with his father. The
old man would understand.

2

About eleven o'clock Craven came to see him. Craven's father had been
a Fellow of Trinity and Professor of Chinese to the University. He had
died some five years ago and now the widow and young Craven's sister
lived in Cambridge. Craven had tried, during his first term, to make
a friend of Olva, but his happy, eager attitude to the whole world
had seemed crude and even priggish to Olva's reserve, and all Craven's
overtures had been refused, quietly, kindly, but firmly. Craven had not
resented the repulse; it was not his habit to resent anything, and as
the year had passed, Olva had realized that Craven's impetuous desire
for the friendship of the world was something in him perfectly natural
and unforced. Olva had discovered also that Craven's devotion to his
mother and sister was the boy's leading motive in life. Olva had only
seen the girl, Margaret, once; she had been finishing her education in
Dresden, and he remembered her as dark, reserved, aloof--opposite indeed
from her brother's cheerful good-fellowship. But for Rupert Craven this
girl was his world; she was obviously cleverer, more temperamental than
he, and he felt this and bowed to it.

These things Olva liked in him, and had the boy not been so intimate
with Cardillac and Carfax, Olva might have made advances, Craven took a
man of the Carfax type with extreme simplicity; he thought his geniality
and physical strength excused much coarseness and vulgarity. He was
still young enough to have the Public School code--the most amazing
thing in the h