were himself whispering in his own ear some advice of urgent pleading
that he was himself rejecting . . . he was even weighted with the sense
of some enlarged growth, of having in fact to carry more, physically
as well as spiritually, than he had ever carried before. Now it quite
definitely and audibly pleaded--

"Submit--submit--submit. . . . See the tangle that you are getting
yourself into. See the trouble that you are getting others into. See
the tangle and muddle that you are making of it all. . . . Submit. . . .
Give in. . . . You're beaten."

But he was not beaten. Neither the love of Margaret, nor the suspicions
of Rupert, nor the hysteria of Bunning had as yet defeated him . . . and
even as he resisted it was as though he were fighting himself.

Sidney Street was now quite black with thronging undergraduates moving
towards the Common. There was very little noise in it all; every now
and again some voice would call aloud to some other voice and would be
answered back; a murmur like the swelling of some stream, unlike, in its
uniformity and curious evenness of note, any human conversation, seemed
to cling to the old grey walls. All of it at present orderly enough but
with sinister omen in its very quiet.

Olva felt an increasing excitement as he moved. It was an excitement
that had some basis in the stir that was about him, in the murmur like
bees of the crowd, in the soft stirring of grey branches above the walls
of the street against the night sky, in the golden lights that, set in
dim towers, shone high up above their heads. In all these things there
was a mysterious tremor that beat, with the rhythm of a pulse, from the
town's very heart--but there was more than that in his excitement. There
was working in him a conviction that he was now, even now, reaching the
very climax of his adventure. Very certainly, very surely, the moment
was thawing near, and even in the instant when he had, that very
evening, left his rooms, he had stepped, he instinctively knew, out of
one stage into another.

"Where are we going?" he asked Lawrence.

"Common. There's goin' to be an old fire. Hope there's a row--don't mind
who I hit."

The side streets that led to the Common made progress more difficult,
and, with the increased difficulty, came also a more riotous spirit.
Some one started "The Two Obadiahs," and it was lustily sung with a
good deal of repetition; several people had wooden rattles, intended
to encourage Col