"Saddle, sir? No, sir. What should there be a saddle here for?"

"Oh, well," said Jack vaguely. "I've come to fetch away the hammock,
anyhow."

Certainly the rooms looked desolate. Even the carpets were gone, and the
unstained boards in the middle seemed suggestive of peculiar dreariness.
It was really very difficult to believe that these were the rooms where
he and Frank had had such pleasant times--little friendly
bridge-parties, and dinners, and absurd theatricals, in which Frank had
sustained, with extreme rapidity, with the aid of hardly any properties
except a rouge-pot, a burnt cork and three or four wisps of hair of
various shades, the part of almost any eminent authority in the
University of Cambridge that you cared to name. There were long
histories, invented by Frank himself, of the darker sides of the lives
of the more respectable members of the Senate--histories that grew, like
legends, term by term--in which the most desperate deeds were done. The
Master of Trinity, for example, in these Sagas, would pass through
extraordinary love adventures, or discover the North Pole, or give a
lecture, with practical examples, of the art of flying; the Provost of
King's would conspire with the President of Queen's College, to murder
the Vice-Chancellor and usurp his dignities. And these histories would
be enacted with astonishing realism, chiefly by Frank himself, with the
help of a zealous friend or two who were content to obey.

And these were all over now; and that was the very door through which
the Vice-Chancellor was accustomed to escape from his assassins!

* * * * *

Jack sighed again; passed through, picked up the parcel of clothes that
lay in the window-seat, unhitched the hammock in which Frank had slept
last night (he noticed the ends of three cigarettes placed on the cover
of a convenient biscuit-tin), and went off resembling a _retiarius_.
Mrs. Jillings sniffed again as she looked after him up the court. She
didn't understand those young gentlemen at all; and frequently said so.

(VI)

At half-past six o'clock that morning--about the time that Jack awoke in
Cambridge--John Harris, laborer, emerged, very sleepy and frowsy--for he
had sat up late last night at the "Spotted Dog"--from the door of a
small cottage on the Ely road, in the middle of Grunty Fen. He looked
this way and that, wondering whether it were as late as his
kitchen-clock informed him, and observi