ck. "Balliol is quite near. At the
end of this street in fact. I can show it to you from the front-door."

Yes, he had controlled himself. But this, he furiously felt, did not
make him look the less a fool. What ought he to have SAID? He prayed,
as he followed the victorious young woman downstairs, that l'esprit de
l'escalier might befall him. Alas, it did not.

"By the way," she said, when he had shown her where Balliol lay, "have
you told anybody that you aren't dying just for me?"

"No," he answered, "I have preferred not to."

"Then officially, as it were, and in the eyes of the world, you die for
me? Then all's well that ends well. Shall we say good-bye here? I
shall be on the Judas Barge; but I suppose there will be a crush, as
yesterday?"

"Sure to be. There always is on the last night of the Eights, you know.
Good-bye."

"Good-bye, little John--small John," she cried across her shoulder,
having the last word.

XVII

He might not have grudged her the last word, had she properly needed
it. Its utter superfluity--the perfection of her victory without it--was
what galled him. Yes, she had outflanked him, taken him unawares, and he
had fired not one shot. Esprit de l'escalier--it was as he went upstairs
that he saw how he might yet have snatched from her, if not the victory,
the palm. Of course he ought to have laughed aloud--"Capital, capital!
You really do deserve to fool me. But ah, yours is a love that can't be
dissembled. Never was man by maiden loved more ardently than I by you,
my poor girl, at this moment."

And stay!--what if she really HAD been but pretending to have killed her
love? He paused on the threshold of his room. The sudden doubt made his
lost chance the more sickening. Yet was the doubt dear to him ... What
likelier, after all, than that she had been pretending? She had already
twitted him with his lack of intuition. He had not seen that she
loved him when she certainly did love him. He had needed the pearls'
demonstration of that.--The pearls! THEY would betray her. He darted to
the fender, and one of them he espied there instantly--white? A rather
flushed white, certainly. For the other he had to peer down. There it
lay, not very distinct on the hearth's black-leading.

He turned away. He blamed himself for not dismissing from his mind the
hussy he had dismissed from his room. Oh for an ounce of civet and a
few poppies! The water-jug stood as a reminder of the hateful visit
a