in a frank and deferential attitude. An image of routine, he looked
like one engaged to give a decorous air to multitudes of pecadilloes.
His blue eyes rested on the travellers. "I don't know you, sirs, but if
you want to speak I shall be glad to hear the observations you may have
to make," they seemed to say.

Against the wall reposed a bicycle with tennis-racquet buckled to its
handle. A bull-dog bitch, working her snout from side to side, was
snuffling horribly; the great iron-studded door to which her chain was
fastened stayed immovable. Through this narrow mouth, human metal had
been poured for centuries--poured, moulded, given back.

"Come along," said Shelton.

They now entered the Bishop's Head, and had their dinner in the room
where Shelton had given his Derby dinner to four-and-twenty well-bred
youths; here was the picture of the racehorse that the wineglass, thrown
by one of them, had missed when it hit the waiter; and there, serving
Crocker with anchovy sauce, was the very waiter. When they had finished,
Shelton felt the old desire to rise with difficulty from the table; the
old longing to patrol the streets with arm hooked in some other arm;
the old eagerness to dare and do something heroic--and unlawful; the
old sense that he was of the forest set, in the forest college, of the
forest country in the finest world. The streets, all grave and mellow
in the sunset, seemed to applaud this after-dinner stroll; the entrance
quad of his old college--spaciously majestic, monastically modern, for
years the heart of his universe, the focus of what had gone before it
in his life, casting the shadow of its grey walls over all that had come
after-brought him a sense of rest from conflict, and trust in his own
important safety. The garden-gate, whose lofty spikes he had so often
crowned with empty water-bottles, failed to rouse him. Nor when they
passed the staircase where he had flung a leg of lamb at some indelicate
disturbing tutor, did he feel remorse. High on that staircase were the
rooms in which he had crammed for his degree, upon the system by which
the scholar simmers on the fire of cramming, boils over at the moment of
examination, and is extinct for ever after. His coach's face recurred to
him, a man with thrusting eyes, who reeled off knowledge all the week,
and disappeared to town on Sundays.

They passed their tutor's staircase.

"I wonder if little Turl would remember us?" said Crocker; "I should
like