hat to me ... before you were born. Before ...
on a hillside it was ... how terribly well I remember."

Michael did not want her to speak of his father. He felt too helpless in
the presence of that memory. The death of Prescott was another matter, a
trivial and pathetic thing. Quickly he brought his mother back to that,
until she was tired with the flowing of many tears.

Michael spent the rest of the Long Vacation with his mother in London,
and gradually he made himself a companion to her. They went to theaters
together, because it gave her a sentimental pleasure to think how much
poor Dicky Prescott would have enjoyed this piece once upon a time.
Between them was the unspoken thought of how much somebody else would
have enjoyed this piece also. Michael teased his mother lightly about
her bazaars, until she told him he was turning into a second Prescott
himself. He discussed seriously the problem of Stella, but he did not
say a word of his hope that she would fall in love with Alan. Alan,
however, who was already back in town, came to spend week-ends that were
very much like the week-ends spent at Carlington Road in the past. Mrs.
Fane enjoyed dining with her son and his friend. She asked the same sort
of delightfully foolish questions about Oxford that she used to ask
about school. In October Mrs. Carruthers arrived back in town, and by
this time Mrs. Fane was ready to begin again to flit from charity to
charity, and from fad to fad. Yet, however much she seemed to become
again her old elusive, exquisite self, Michael never again let her
escape entirely from the intimacy which had been created by the
sentimental shock of Prescott's death, and he went up for his third year
at Oxford with a feeling that somehow during this vacation he had grown
more sure of himself and to his mother more precious.

"What have you done this vac?" they asked him in Venner's on the night
of reunion.

"Nothing very much," he said, and to himself he thought less than usual
in fact, and yet really in one way such a very great deal.

CHAPTER XII

2O2 HIGH

The large room at 202 High Street which Michael shared with Grainger and
Lonsdale was perhaps in the annals of university lodgings the most
famous. According to tradition, the house was originally part of the
palace of a cardinal. Whether it had been the habitation of
ecclesiastical greatness or not, it had certainly harbored grandeur of
some kind; to this testified the two f