s through their lungs. She paid no heed. It was as if she
stood alone with her lover on some silent pinnacle of the world. It was
as if she were a little girl with a brand-new and very expensive doll
which had banished all the little other old toys from her mind.

She simply could not, in her naive rapture, take her eyes off her
companion. To the dancers and stampers of the towing-path, many of whom
were now being ferried back across the river, and to the other youths
on the roof of the barge, Zuleika's air of absorption must have seemed
a little strange. For already the news that the Duke loved Zuleika, and
that she loved him not, and would stoop to no man who loved her, had
spread like wild-fire among the undergraduates. The two youths in whom
the Duke had deigned to confide had not held their peace. And the effect
that Zuleika had made as she came down to the river was intensified by
the knowledge that not the great paragon himself did she deem worthy of
her. The mere sight of her had captured young Oxford. The news of her
supernal haughtiness had riveted the chains.

"Come!" said the Duke at length, staring around him with the eyes of one
awakened from a dream. "Come! I must take you back to Judas."

"But you won't leave me there?" pleaded Zuleika. "You will stay to
dinner? I am sure my grandfather would be delighted."

"I am sure he would," said the Duke, as he piloted her down the steps of
the barge. "But alas, I have to dine at the Junta to-night."

"The Junta? What is that?"

"A little dining-club. It meets every Tuesday."

"But--you don't mean you are going to refuse me for that?"

"To do so is misery. But I have no choice. I have asked a guest."

"Then ask another: ask me!" Zuleika's notions of Oxford life were rather
hazy. It was with difficulty that the Duke made her realise that he
could not--not even if, as she suggested, she dressed herself up as a
man--invite her to the Junta. She then fell back on the impossibility
that he would not dine with her to-night, his last night in this world.
She could not understand that admirable fidelity to social engagements
which is one of the virtues implanted in the members of our aristocracy.
Bohemian by training and by career, she construed the Duke's refusal as
either a cruel slight to herself or an act of imbecility. The thought of
being parted from her for one moment was torture to him; but "noblesse
oblige," and it was quite impossible for him to break an