here," continued Appleby, without a
tremor of embarrassment. "Who's for whisky?"

"Look here, young Apple-pip, or whatever your name is, what you've got
to understand is that...."

Appleby again interrupted Lonsdale.

"Can we make up a bridge four? Or are you chaps not keen on cards?"

"What you require, young Appleby," began Lonsdale.

"You've got it right this time," said Appleby encouragingly.

"What you require is to have your room bally well turned upside down."

"Oh, really?" said Appleby, with a suave assumption of interest.

"Yes," answered Lonsdale gloomily, and somehow the little affirmative
that was meant to convey so much of fearful intent was so palpably
unimpressive that Lonsdale turned to his companions and appealed for
their more eloquent support.

"Tell him he mustn't come into Venner's and put on all that side. It's
not done. He's a fresher," gasped Lonsdale, obviously helpless in that
absorbing chair.

"All right," agreed Appleby cheerfully. "I'll send the order up to you
next time."

Immediately afterward, though exactly how it happened Lonsdale could
never probably explain, he found himself drinking Appleby's whisky and
smoking one of Appleby's cigars. This seemed to kindle the spark of his
resentment to flame, and he sprang up.

"We ought to debag him!" he cried.

Appleby was thereupon debagged; but as he made no resistance to the
divestiture and as he continued to walk about trouserless and dispense
hospitality without any apparent loss of dignity, the debagging had to
be written down a failure. Finally he folded up his trousers and put on
a dressing-gown of purple velvet, and when they left him, he was
watching them descend his staircase and actually was calling after them
to remind Venner about the cigars, if the office were still open.

"Hopeless," sighed Lonsdale. "The man's a hopeless ass."

"I think he had the laugh, though," said Michael.

CHAPTER VIII

THE OXFORD LOOKING-GLASS

Roll-calls were not kept at St. Mary's with that scrupulousness of
outward exterior which, in conjunction with early rising, such a
discipline may have been designed primarily to secure. On the morning
after the attempted adjustment of Appleby's behavior, a raw and vaporous
November morning, Michael at one minute to eight o'clock ran collarless,
unbrushed, unshaven, toward the steps leading up to hall at whose head
stood the Dean beside the clerkly recorder of these sorry matutinal
app