e false quantities he made were so excruciating and so many that,
while the very scouts exchanged glances, the dons at the high table lost
all command of their features, and made horrible noises in the effort to
contain themselves. The very Warden dared not look from his plate.

In every breast around the high table, behind every shirt-front or
black silk waistcoat, glowed the recognition of a new birth. Suddenly,
unheralded, a thing of highest destiny had fallen into their academic
midst. The stock of Common Room talk had to-night been re-inforced and
enriched for all time. Summers and winters would come and go, old faces
would vanish, giving place to new, but the story of Pedby's grace would
be told always. Here was a tradition that generations of dons yet unborn
would cherish and chuckle over. Something akin to awe mingled itself
with the subsiding merriment. And the dons, having finished their soup,
sipped in silence the dry brown sherry.

Those who sat opposite to the Warden, with their backs to the void,
were oblivious of the matter that had so recently teased them. They
were conscious only of an agreeable hush, in which they peered down
the vistas of the future, watching the tradition of Pedby's grace as it
rolled brighter and ever brighter down to eternity.

The pop of a champagne cork startled them to remembrance that this was a
bump-supper, and a bump-supper of a peculiar kind. The turbot that
came after the soup, the champagne that succeeded the sherry, helped to
quicken in these men of thought the power to grapple with a reality. The
aforesaid three or four who had been down at the river recovered their
lost belief in the evidence of their eyes and ears. In the rest was a
spirit of receptivity which, as the meal went on, mounted to conviction.
The Sub-Warden made a second and more determined attempt to enlighten
the Warden; but the Warden's eye met his with a suspicion so cruelly
pointed that he again floundered and gave in.

All adown those empty other tables gleamed the undisturbed cutlery, and
the flowers in the pots innocently bloomed. And all adown either wall,
unneeded but undisbanded, the scouts remained. Some of the elder ones
stood with closed eyes and heads sunk forward, now and again jerking
themselves erect, and blinking around, wondering, remembering.

And for a while this scene was looked down on by a not disinterested
stranger. For a while, her chin propped on her hands, Zuleika leaned
ove