lute idiot," said Jack Kirkby
indignantly.

Frank grinned pleasantly, and added his left foot to his right one in
the broad window-seat.

These two young men were sitting in one of the most pleasant places in
all the world in which to sit on a summer evening--in a ground-floor
room looking out upon the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge. It
was in that short space of time, between six and seven, during which the
Great Court is largely deserted. The athletes and the dawdlers have not
yet returned from field and river; and Fellows and other persons, young
enough to know better, who think that a summer evening was created for
the reading of books, have not yet emerged from their retreats. A
white-aproned cook or two moves across the cobbled spaces with trays
upon their heads; a tradesman's boy comes out of the corner entrance
from the hostel; a cat or two stretches himself on the grass; but, for
the rest, the court lies in broad sunshine; the shadows slope eastwards,
and the fitful splash and trickle of the fountain asserts itself clearly
above the gentle rumble of Trinity Street.

Within, the room in which these two sat was much like other rooms of the
same standing; only, in this one case the walls were paneled with
white-painted deal. Three doors led out of it--two into a tiny bedroom
and a tinier dining-room respectively; the third on to the passage
leading to the lecture-rooms. Frank found it very convenient, since he
thus was enabled, at every hour of the morning when the lectures broke
up, to have the best possible excuse for conversing with his friends
through the window.

The room was furnished really well. Above the mantelpiece, where rested
an array of smoking-materials and a large silver cigarette-box, hung an
ancestral-looking portrait, in a dull gilded frame, of an aged man, with
a ruff round his neck, purchased for one guinea; there was a sofa and a
set of chairs upholstered in a good damask: a black piano by Broadwood;
a large oval gate-leg table; a bureau; shelves filled with very
indiscriminate literature--law books, novels, Badminton, magazines and
ancient school editions of the classics; a mahogany glass-fronted
bookcase packed with volumes of esthetic appearance--green-backed poetry
books with white labels; old leather tomes, and all the rest of the
specimens usual to a man who has once thought himself literary. Then
there were engravings, well framed, round the walls; a black iron-work
lam