seem that Mrs. Batch and Katie, who had hurried
out into the hall, were turned to some kind of stone at sight of the
descending apparition. A moment ago, Mrs. Batch had been hoping she
might yet at the last speak motherly words. A hopeless mute now! A
moment ago, Katie's eyelids had been red with much weeping. Even from
them the colour suddenly ebbed now. Dead-white her face was between the
black pearl and the pink. "And this is the man of whom I dared once for
an instant hope that he loved me!"--it was thus that the Duke, quite
correctly, interpreted her gaze.

To her and to her mother he gave an inclusive bow as he swept slowly by.
Stone was the matron, and stone the maid.

Stone, too, the Emperors over the way; and the more poignantly thereby
was the Duke a sight to anguish them, being the very incarnation of what
themselves had erst been, or tried to be. But in this bitterness they
did not forget their sorrow at his doom. They were in a mood to forgive
him the one fault they had ever found in him--his indifference to their
Katie. And now--o mirum mirorum--even this one fault was wiped out.

For, stung by memory of a gibe lately cast at him by himself, the Duke
had paused and, impulsively looking back into the hall, had beckoned
Katie to him; and she had come (she knew not how) to him; and there,
standing on the doorstep whose whiteness was the symbol of her love,
he--very lightly, it is true, and on the upmost confines of the brow,
but quite perceptibly--had kissed her.

XIX

And now he had passed under the little arch between the eighth and the
ninth Emperor, rounded the Sheldonian, and been lost to sight of Katie,
whom, as he was equally glad and sorry he had kissed her, he was able to
dismiss from his mind.

In the quadrangle of the Old Schools he glanced round at the familiar
labels, blue and gold, over the iron-studded doors,--Schola Theologiae
et Antiquae Philosophiae; Museum Arundelianum; Schola Musicae. And
Bibliotheca Bodleiana--he paused there, to feel for the last time the
vague thrill he had always felt at sight of the small and devious portal
that had lured to itself, and would always lure, so many scholars from
the ends of the earth, scholars famous and scholars obscure, scholars
polyglot and of the most diverse bents, but none of them not stirred in
heart somewhat on the found threshold of the treasure-house. "How
deep, how perfect, the effect made here by refusal to make any effect
what