once again a
definite corporeal existence. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed the
twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of silvery apology for obtruding
the hour. Michael came back into himself with a start of confusion.

"I say, I must go."

Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.

"I say," said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, "I think
I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night."

"No, no, no, my dear boy; I've been very much interested," insisted
Prescott.

And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth
of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to
discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly
entertained his host.

"Nothing," he finally decided.

Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford
with all the rich confidence of a term's maturity. Even in the drizzle
of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and
waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more
beautiful.

After hall Avery came up to Michael's room, and while the rain dripped
endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly
assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term
before.

Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with
Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth,
so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the
blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner.

"You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott," he
affirmed. "I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany
without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was
perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant."

"But you wouldn't be," Avery objected, "if you thought about it."

"No, but I shouldn't think about it," Michael pointed out. "I should
have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your
eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much
champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know
just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn't quite the
silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his
third cigar."

Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating
dreamily the Mon