chael, Lonsdale, Grainger and the other
stalwarts. Then he turned away.

"Good night," Lonsdale called after the retreating figure of the tall
hunched don, and not being successful in luring him back, he poured his
scorn upon the defaulters safe in their rooms above.

"You are a lot of rotters. Come down and make another."

But the freshmen were not yet sufficiently hardy to do this. One by one
they melted away, and Lonsdale marked his contempt for their
pusillanimity by throwing two syphons and his gown into the Warden's
garden. After which he invited Michael and his fellow die-hards to drink
a glass of port in his rooms. Here for an hour they sat, discussing
their contemporaries.

In the morning Shadbolt was asked if anybody had been hauled for last
night's bonner.

"Mr. Fane, Mr. Grainger and the Honorable Lonsdale," he informed the
inquirer. Together those three interviewed the Dean.

"Two guineas each," he announced after a brief homily on the foolishness
and inconvenience of keeping everybody up on the first Sunday of term.
"And if you feel aggrieved, you can get up a subscription among your
co-lunatics to defray your expenses."

Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look
like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the
other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a
manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same
to-morrow.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST TERM

His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of
discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had
certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually
varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term
became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after
numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view
of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own
"year." These trials of personality were conducted with all the help
that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had
registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often
sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt
inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books.
Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on
the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby f