d about dancing and fencing, and he was
therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one who
really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a
Sword club at Oxford.

"Hadn't you better join as well next term?" he suggested. "Rather good
ecker, I fancy."

"Much better than golf," said Michael.

"Oh, rather," Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to
his resolve of last summer.

For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he
wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford
time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town
very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and
graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had
called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth or
sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more desirable.
Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate visit as to a
tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill this vision of
return he refused Guy Hazlewood's invitation to Plashers Mead. It seemed
to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him the joy of
charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of England and
that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.

Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael's mood, and there
for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political
economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen
city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more
ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist
destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford
menaced his action.

Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to
keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February was
that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made Oxford
melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that lured him
forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the window of
Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie awake
infatuated.

Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like
nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon
history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term
surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looke