begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and
fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with
blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The
scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of
physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes from
blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.

Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical
contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with
passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress.
He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness
of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class,
and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If
his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities
which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any
such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position
of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has
affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was
not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no
severance.

He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow
Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself.
Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession
of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange
tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the
thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among
the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as
peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he
were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life,
it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an
overwrought brain.

There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is
almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart
found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And
at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle,
appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and
carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had
taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a
hobble. Meditative, he looked straig