cher. Your luggage has arrived, and perhaps you'll settle
with me presently. Henry will show you to your rooms. Henry! St.
Cuthbert's. Four. Two pair right."

The red-headed under-porter picked up Michael's bag, and Michael was
preparing to follow him at once, when the unctuous man held up a warning
hand. Then he turned to look into a large square pigeon-hole labeled
Porcher.

"These letters are for you, sir," he explained pompously. Michael took
them, and in a dream followed Henry under a great gothic gateway, and
along a gravel path. In a doorway numbered IV, Henry stopped and shouted
"Porcher!" From an echoing vault came a cry in answer, and the scout
appeared.

"One of your gentlemen arrived," said Henry. "Mr. Fane." Then he touched
his cap and retired.

"Any more luggage in the lodge, sir?" Porcher asked.

"Not much," said Michael apologetically.

"There's a nice lot of stuff in your rooms," Porcher informed him. "Come
in yesterday morning, it did."

They were mounting the stone stairway, and on each of the floors Michael
was made mechanically aware by a printed notice above a water-tap that
no slops must be emptied there. This prohibition stuck in his mind
somehow as the first ascetic demand of the university.

"These are your rooms, sir, and when you want me, you'll shout, of
course. I'm just unpacking Mr. Lonsdale's wine."

Michael was conscious of pale October sunlight upon the heaped-up
packing-cases; he was conscious of the unnatural brilliancy of the fire
in the sunlight; he was conscious that life at Oxford was conducted with
much finer amenities than life at school. Simultaneously he was aware of
a loneliness; yet as he once more turned to survey his room, it was a
fleeting loneliness which quickly perished in the satisfaction of a
privacy that hitherto he had never possessed. He turned into the
bedroom, and looked out across the quad, across the rectangle of vivid
green grass, across the Warden's garden with its faint gaiety of
autumnal flowers and tufted gray walls, and beyond to where the elms of
the deer-park were massed against the thin sky and the deer moved in
leisurely files about the spare sunlight.

It did not take Michael long to arrange his clothes; and then the
problem of undoing the packing-cases presented itself. A hammer would be
necessary, and a chisel. He must shout for Porcher. Shouting in the
tremulous peace of this October morning would inevitably attract more
attention to