lowing afternoon to find the family and various guests waiting for
her in the hall.

"Well, I hope we shan't miss everybody," said Alice sharply. "How late
are we?"

She turned to Herbert Pryce.

The young don smiled and evaded the question.

"Nearly half an hour!" said Alice. "Of course they'll think we're not
coming."

"They" were another section of the party who were taking a couple of
boats round from the lower river, and were to meet the walkers coming
across the Parks, at the Cherwell.

"Dreadfully sorry!" said Connie, who had opened her eyes, however, as
though Alice's tone astonished her. "But my watch has gone quite mad."

"It does it every afternoon!" murmured Alice to a girl friend of Nora's
who was going with the party. It was an aside, but plainly heard by
Constance--whose cheeks flushed.

She turned appealingly to Herbert Pryce.

"Please carry my waterproof, while I button my gloves." Pryce was
enchanted. As the party left the house, he and Constance walked on
together, ahead of the others. She put on her most charming manners, and
the young man was more than flattered.

What was it, he asked himself, complacently, that gave her such a
delicate distinction? Her grey dress, and soft grey hat, were, he
supposed, perfect of their kind. But Oxford in the summer term was full
of pretty dresses. No, it must be her ease, her sureness of herself that
banished any awkward self-consciousness both in herself and her
companions, and allowed a man to do himself justice.

He forgot her recent snubs and went off at score about his own affairs,
his college, his prospects of winning a famous mathematical prize given
by the Berlin Academy, his own experience of German Universities, and
the shortcomings of Oxford. On these last he became scornfully voluble.
He was inclined to think he should soon cut it, and go in for public
life. These university towns were really very narrowing!

"Certainly," said Constance amiably. Was he thinking of Parliament?

Well, no, not at once. But journalism was always open to a man with
brains, and through journalism one got into the House, when the chance
came along. The House of Commons was dangerously in want of new blood.

"I am certain I could speak," he said ardently. "I have made several
attempts here, and I may say they have always come off."

Constance threw him a shy glance. She was thinking of a dictum of Uncle
Ewen's which he had delivered to her on a walk some days