d now Oxford was astir with footsteps and laughter--the laughter and
quick footsteps of youths released from lecture-rooms. The Duke shifted
from the window. Somehow, he did not care to be observed, though it was
usually at this hour that he showed himself for the setting of some
new fashion in costume. Many an undergraduate, looking up, missed the
picture in the window-frame.

The Duke paced to and fro, smiling ecstatically. He took the two studs
from his pocket and gazed at them. He looked in the glass, as one
seeking the sympathy of a familiar. For the first time in his life,
he turned impatiently aside. It was a new kind of sympathy he needed
to-day.

The front door slammed, and the staircase creaked to the ascent of two
heavy boots. The Duke listened, waited irresolute. The boots passed his
door, were already clumping up the next flight. "Noaks!" he cried. The
boots paused, then clumped down again. The door opened and disclosed
that homely figure which Zuleika had seen on her way to Judas.

Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of
anomalies. These two youths were (odd as it may seem to you) subject to
the same Statutes, affiliated to the same College, reading for the same
School; aye! and though the one had inherited half a score of noble and
castellated roofs, whose mere repairs cost him annually thousands and
thousands of pounds, and the other's people had but one little mean
square of lead, from which the fireworks of the Crystal Palace were
clearly visible every Thursday evening, in Oxford one roof sheltered
both of them. Furthermore, there was even some measure of intimacy
between them. It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in the
direction of Noaks than in any other. He saw in Noaks his own foil and
antithesis, and made a point of walking up the High with him at least
once in every term. Noaks, for his part, regarded the Duke with feelings
mingled of idolatry and disapproval. The Duke's First in Mods oppressed
him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had scraped a Second) more than
all the other differences between them. But the dullard's envy of
brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to
a bad end. Noaks may have regarded the Duke as a rather pathetic figure,
on the whole.

"Come in, Noaks," said the Duke. "You have been to a lecture?"

"Aristotle's Politics," nodded Noaks.

"And what were they?" asked the Duke. He was eager for sympathy in