t to throw away their lives. They said
they were very sorry, but in this particular matter they must please
themselves. In vain he pled. They admitted that but for his example they
would never have thought of dying. They wished they could show him their
gratitude in any way but the one which would rob them of it.

The Duke drifted further down the High, bespeaking every undergraduate
he met, leaving untried no argument, no inducement. For one man, whose
name he happened to know, he invented an urgent personal message from
Miss Dobson imploring him not to die on her account. On another man he
offered to settle by hasty codicil a sum of money sufficient to yield
an annual income of two thousand pounds--three thousand--any sum within
reason. With another he offered to walk, arm in arm, to Carfax and back
again. All to no avail.

He found himself in the precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little
open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human
life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have
hesitated to utter. As he piled up the invective, he noticed an ominous
restiveness in the congregation--murmurs, clenching of hands, dark
looks. He saw the pulpit as yet another trap laid for him by the gods.
He had walked straight into it: another moment, and he might be dragged
down, overwhelmed by numbers, torn limb from limb. All that was in
him of quelling power he put hastily into his eyes, and manoeuvred his
tongue to gentler discourse, deprecating his right to judge "this lady,"
and merely pointing the marvel, the awful though noble folly, of his
resolve. He ended on a note of quiet pathos. "To-night I shall be among
the shades. There be not you, my brothers."

Good though the sermon was in style and sentiment, the flaw in its
reasoning was too patent for any converts to be made. As he walked out
of the quadrangle, the Duke felt the hopelessness of his cause. Still
he battled bravely for it up the High, waylaying, cajoling, commanding,
offering vast bribes. He carried his crusade into the Loder, and
thence into Vincent's, and out into the street again, eager, untiring,
unavailing: everywhere he found his precept checkmated by his example.

The sight of The MacQuern coming out top-speed from the Market, with
a large but inexpensive bunch of flowers, reminded him of the luncheon
that was to be. Never to throw over an engagement was for him, as we
have seen, a point of honour. But t