to get played out. I wanted to do things all the rest of
my life. Fellows who grind at college and come out Senior Wranglers,
begin and end there. You don't hear of 'em again."

"I see," said Miss Charteris, amusement in her eyes. "So you felt it
wisest to avoid being Senior Wrangler?"

"Just so," said the Boy. "I was content with a fairly respectable B.A.
and I hope you saw me take it. How rotten it is, going up in a bunch,
all hanging on to an old chap's fingers."

"Boy, Boy! I know all about you! You wasted golden opportunities; you
declined to use your excellent abilities; you gave the authorities an
anxious time. You were so disgracefully popular, that everybody
thought your example the finest thing to follow, and you were more or
less responsible for every lark and row which took place during your
time."

The Boy did not smile. He looked at her, with a quaint, innocent
seriousness, which made her feel almost uncomfortable.

"Dear," he said, "I had plenty of money, and heaps of friends, and I
wanted to have a good time. Also I wanted all the other fellows to
have a good time; and I enjoyed getting the better of all the old
fogies who had forgotten what youth was like--if they'd ever known it.
And I had no mother to ask me questions, and no sisters to turn up at
my rooms unexpectedly. But I can tell you this, Christobel. I hope to
be married soon; and I hope to marry a woman so sweet and noble and
pure, that her very presence tests a man's every thought, feeling, and
memory. And I can honestly look into your dear eyes and say: My wife
will be welcome to know every detail of every prank I ever played in
Cambridge; nor is there a thing in those three years I need feel
ashamed of her knowing. There! Will that do?"

Miss Charteris threw out a deprecatory hand. "Oh, Boy dear!" she said.
"I never doubted that. My Little Boy Blue, don't I know you? But I
cannot let you talk as if you owe me any explanations. How curious to
think I saw you so often during those years, yet we never actually met."

The Boy smiled. "Yes," he said, "we were all awfully proud of you, you
know. What was it you took at Girton?"

Miss Charteris mentioned, modestly, the highest honours in classics as
yet taken by a woman. The Boy had often heard it before. But he
listened with bated breath.

"Yes," he said, "we were awfully proud of it, because of your tennis,
and because of you being--well, just _you_. If you had