knew Mr. Druce could be
trusted to send the bottle round to his rooms immediately, he preferred
to carry it away with him. He slipped it into the breast-pocket of his
coat, almost heedless of the slight extrusion it made there.

Just as he was about to cross the High again, on his way home, a
butcher's cart dashed down the slope, recklessly driven. He stepped well
back on the pavement, and smiled a sardonic smile. He looked to right
and to left, carefully gauging the traffic. Some time elapsed before he
deemed the road clear enough for transit.

Safely across, he encountered a figure that seemed to loom up out of the
dim past. Oover! Was it but yesternight that Oover dined with him? With
the sensation of a man groping among archives, he began to apologise to
the Rhodes Scholar for having left him so abruptly at the Junta. Then,
presto!--as though those musty archives were changed to a crisp morning
paper agog with terrific head-lines--he remembered the awful resolve of
Oover, and of all young Oxford.

"Of course," he asked, with a lightness that hardly hid his dread of the
answer, "you have dismissed the notion you were toying with when I left
you?"

Oover's face, like his nature, was as sensitive as it was massive,
and it instantly expressed his pain at the doubt cast on his high
seriousness. "Duke," he asked, "d'you take me for a skunk?"

"Without pretending to be quite sure what a skunk is," said the Duke,
"I take you to be all that it isn't. And the high esteem in which I
hold you is the measure for me of the loss that your death would be to
America and to Oxford."

Oover blushed. "Duke" he said "that's a bully testimonial. But don't
worry. America can turn out millions just like me, and Oxford can have
as many of them as she can hold. On the other hand, how many of YOU
can be turned out, as per sample, in England? Yet you choose to destroy
yourself. You avail yourself of the Unwritten Law. And you're right,
Sir. Love transcends all."

"But does it? What if I told you I had changed my mind?"

"Then, Duke," said Oover, slowly, "I should believe that all those yarns
I used to hear about the British aristocracy were true, after all. I
should aver that you were not a white man. Leading us on like that, and
then--Say, Duke! Are you going to die to-day, or not?"

"As a matter of fact, I am, but--"

"Shake!"

"But--"

Oover wrung the Duke's hand, and was passing on. "Stay!" he was adjured.

"Sorry, unable.