ir oneness. There they lay, these
multitudinous and disparate quadrangles, all their rivalries merged in
the making of a great catholic pattern. And the roofs of the buildings
around them seemed level with their lawns. No higher the roofs of the
very towers. Up from their tiny segment of the earth's spinning surface
they stood negligible beneath infinity. And new, too, quite new, in
eternity; transient upstarts. I saw Oxford as a place that had no more
past and no more future than a mining-camp. I smiled down. O hoary and
unassailable mushroom!... But if a man carry his sense of proportion far
enough, lo! he is back at the point from which he started. He knows
that eternity, as conceived by him, is but an instant in eternity, and
infinity but a speck in infinity. How should they belittle the things
near to him?... Oxford was venerable and magical, after all, and
enduring. Aye, and not because she would endure was it the less
lamentable that the young lives within her walls were like to be taken.
My equanimity was gone; and a tear fell on Oxford.

And then, as though Oxford herself were speaking up to me, the air
vibrated with a sweet noise of music. It was the hour of one; the end
of the Duke's hour of grace. Through the silvery tangle of sounds from
other clocks I floated quickly down to the Broad.

XIII

I had on the way a horrible apprehension. What if the Duke, in his
agony, had taken the one means to forgetfulness? His room, I could see,
was lit up; but a man does not necessarily choose to die in the dark. I
hovered, afraid, over the dome of the Sheldonian. I saw that the window
of the room above the Duke's was also lit up. And there was no reason
at all to doubt the survival of Noaks. Perhaps the sight of him would
hearten me.

I was wrong. The sight of Noaks in his room was as dismal a thing as
could be. With his chin sunk on his breast, he sat there, on a rickety
chair, staring up at the mantel-piece. This he had decked out as a sort
of shrine. In the centre, aloft on an inverted tin that had contained
Abernethy biscuits, stood a blue plush frame, with an inner rim of
brass, several sizes too big for the picture-postcard installed in it.
Zuleika's image gazed forth with a smile that was obviously not intended
for the humble worshipper at this execrable shrine. On either side
of her stood a small vase, one holding some geraniums, the other some
mignonette. And just beneath her was placed that iron ring