at hall spinning with
light and motion.

Alan was evidently pleased that he was being able to show Stella his own
college. He wore about him an air of confidence that Michael did not
remember to have seen so plainly marked before. He and Stella were
dancing together all the time here at Christ Church, and Michael felt
he, too, must dance vigorously, so that he should not find himself
overlooking them. He was shy somehow of overlooking them, and when
Blanche Avery and Eileen Avery and half a dozen more cousins and sisters
of friends had been led back to their chaperones, Michael went over to
his mother and invited her to walk with him in the quadrangles of Christ
Church. She knew why he wanted her to walk with him, and as she took his
arm gently, she pressed it to her side. He thought again how
ridiculously young she seemed and how the lightness of her touch was no
less than that of the ethereal Eileen or the filmy Blanche. He wished he
had asked her to dance with him, but yet on second thoughts was glad he
had not, since to walk with her thus along these dark cloisters, down
which traveled fainter and fainter the fiddles of the Eton Boating Song,
was even better than dancing. Soon they were in Peckwater, standing
silent on the gravel, almost overweighted by that heavy Georgian
quadrangle.

"He lived either on that staircase or that one," said Michael. "But all
the staircases and all the rooms in Peck are just the same, and all the
men who have lived in them for the past fifty years are just the same.
The House is a wonderful place, and the type it displays best changes
less easily than any other."

"I didn't know him when he lived here," she murmured.

With her hand still resting lightly upon his sleeve, Michael felt the
palpitation of long-stored-up memories and emotions. As she stood here
pensive in the darkness, the years were rolling back.

"I expect if he were alive," she went on softly, "he would wonder how
time could have gone by so quickly since he was here. People always do,
don't they, when they revisit places they've known in younger days? When
he was here, I must have been about fifteen. Funny, severe,
narrow-minded old father!"

Michael waited rather anxiously. She had never yet spoken of her life
before she met his father, and he had never brought himself to ask her.

"Funny old man! He was at Cambridge--Trinity College, I think it was
called."

Then she was silent for a while, and Michael knew t