ay after that he said 'Good-bye,'
and escorted the convalescent to Oxford.

'Good luck!' said the explorer as they parted near the Martyrs'
Memorial, each bound for his own college. 'Let's stick to our own
way of life, we two. Don't let's get middle-aged just yet, like
Warner and Davies. And, mind, drop that agency rot, and leave the
curate to Perpetua. They're just the age she twenty, he twenty-five.
You, who're forty-one, have pity!'

That evening Hood smoked his pipe in a college garden. One who
had taught him years ago was there. Hood was fairly candid as to
his real thoughts when he talked to him. He was telling the tale
of that rainy night, as the summer twilight darkened, 'I'm just
forty,' he said. 'It seems as if I could hold my own a bit with
younger men, D.G.!'

His friend looked at him thoughtfully. 'It's fictitious youth, he
said. 'Supposing you were to try marrying and settling down.
Supposing you were to try deserting your perennially youthful
bride the Great Adventure, or the High Romance, or the New
Jerusalem, or whatsoever you call her. Supposing you settle down
with an earthly bride say, a sweet-and-twenty one! Supposing you
had to toe the line of four-meals-a-day in a country vicarage.
You would know your age then.'

Hood looked uninterested and aloof. But he recurred to the
subject again later on, and he asked whether a certain living in
the near neighborhood had been filled.

'No,' said his friend; do you want it?'

Hood flushed up. 'It's the sort of place I'd like to settle down
in,' he said, 'if I were coming home. But why should I come?'

His friend made no answer at once. The same sort of wistful look
came into his eyes that Hood had noticed in the explorer's eyes
that afternoon.

'Why should you not?' he said at last. 'Yet I for one would like
you not to renounce the perpetually juvenile lady. I'm not in a
hurry to see the last of your glad, perennial youth.'

That night Hood lay in his friend's spare room, looking out over
the Gardens. He was reading in bed a college list. It had pencil
notes of the deaths or careers of some contemporaries. Rousing
himself from his researches, he sprang up and put the book away.
He leaned down to the window-shelf. What was that book with the
stained red cover! He remembered a romance that had come out in
his college days of twenty years ago, a book by one who had had
his own rooms before him. He took it back to bed with him, and
turned over the p