the door with his hand pressing on the table. It was almost a
relief to him that the summons had come so soon--it would presently all
be over.

"Come in," he said, and gave one look at the golden mist, at the stars,
at the tender face of Aegidius.

The door was opened slowly with fumbling hands, and there stood there
a large, fat, clumsy, shapeless creature, with a white face, a hooked
nose, an open, foolish mouth.

The reaction was hysterical. To expect a summons to death and public
shame, to find--Bunning. Bunning--that soft, blithering, emotional,
religious, middle-class maniac--Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was
called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most
entertainment. The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered
through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come
up to Saul's with an intense, burning desire to make a mark. He was
stupid, useless at games, having only somewhere behind his fat ugly body
a longing to be connected with some cause, some movement, some person of
whom he might make a hero.

He had, of course, within the first fortnight of his arrival, plunged
himself into dire disgrace. He had asked Lawrence, coming like a young
god from Marlborough, in to coffee; they had made him drunk and laughed
at his hysterical tears: in his desire for popularity he had held a
gathering in his room, with the original intention of coffee, cakes and
gentle conversation; the evening had ended with the arrival of all his
furniture and personal effects upon the grass of the court below his
windows.

He had been despised by the Dons, buffeted and derided by his fellow
undergraduates. Especially had Carfax and Cardillac made his life a
burden to him, and whenever it seemed that there was nothing especial
to do, the cry arose, "Let's go and rag Bunning," and five minutes later
that fat body would tremble at the sound of many men climbing the wooden
stairs, at the loud banging on his wooden door, at the cry, "Hullo,
Bunning--we've come for some coffee."

Then, towards the end of the first year, the Cambridge Christian Union
flung out its net and caught him. His attempt at personal popularity had
failed here as thoroughly as it had failed at school--now for his soul.
He found that the gentlemen of his college who were members of the
Christian Union were eager for his company. They did not laugh at his
conversation nor mock his proffered hospitalities. Th