mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning
had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease
with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he
went back to the river's bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a
while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that
it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level
water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers
and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to
Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a
dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn's name, and deliberately he
did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it
were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was
flowing into the ancestral Thames.

Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to
Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that
was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with
white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for
one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.

At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a
conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary inmate.
His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat, but
continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on the
table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the table
by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still fixed upon
his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a cipher and
regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in his silent
company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this strange youth
with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately carved
countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing instead
of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his waistcoat.
Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker up his pale
forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate examined the
food on the plate before him.

"I think it's rather cold by now," said Michael, unable to keep silence
any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.

"I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better,
I'd read you the six