at
the concert at Magdalen also. Ah! do you remember, Dulce?" And then
she faltered a little, and flushed,--not because Mr. Drummond was
looking at her so intently but at certain thoughts that began to
intrude themselves, which entwined themselves with the moonlighted
cloisters.

"I was to have been there too, only at the last moment I was
prevented," replied Archie; but his tone was inexplicable to the girl,
it was at once so regretful and awe-struck. Good heavens! if he had
met them, and been introduced to them in proper form! They had
mentioned a Mr. Hamilton: well, Hamilton had been a pupil of his; he
had coached him during a term. "You know Hamilton?" he had said,
staring at her; and then he wondered what Hamilton would say if he
came down to stay with him next vacation.

These reflections made him rather absent; and even when he took his
leave, which was not until the falling dews and the glimmer of a late
dusk drove Mrs. Challoner into the house, these thoughts still pursued
him. Nothing else seemed to have taken so strong a hold on him as
this.

"Good heavens!" he kept repeating to himself, "to think that the
merest chance--just the incidental business of a friend--prevented me
from occupying my old rooms during Commemoration! to think I might
have met them in company with Hamilton and the other fellows!"

The sudden sense of disappointment, of something lost and irremediable
in his life, of wasted opportunities, of denied pleasure, came over
the young man's mind. He could not have danced with Nan at the
University ball, it is true: clergymen, according to his creed, must
not dance. But there was the _fete_ at Oriel, and the Magdalen
concert, and the Long Walk in the Christchurch meadows, and doubtless
other opportunities.

He never asked himself if these girls would have interested him so
much if he had met them first in ordinary society: from the very first
moment they had attracted him strangely. Had he only known them a
fortnight? Good heavens! it seemed months, years, a lifetime! These
revolutions of mind are not to be measured by time. It had come to
this that the late fellow of Oriel, so aristocratic in his tastes, so
temperate in his likings, had entered certain devious paths, where
hidden pitfalls and thorny enclosures warn the unwary traveller of
unknown dangers, and in which he was walking, not blindfold, but by
strongest will and intent, led by impulse like a mere boy, and not
daring to raise