er some trick with the skin of a banana which ought to have been
an orange and a wooden match which ought to have been a wax vesta.
Michael, who was sitting next to him, prodded anxiously his ribs.

"What's the matter?" demanded Lonsdale indignantly. "Can't you see I'm
doing a trick?"

"Marjoribanks is drinking your health," whispered Michael in an agony
that Lonsdale would be passed over.

"Hurrah!" shouted Lonsdale, rising to his feet and scandalizing his
fellows by his intoxicated audacity. "Where is the old ripper!" Then
"Mark over!" he shouted and collapsed into Tommy Grainger's lap.
Everybody laughed, and everybody, even the cynosures from New College
and University, began to drink Lonsdale's health without heel-taps.

"No heelers, young Lonsdale," they called mirthfully.

Lonsdale pulled himself together, stood up, and, balancing himself with
one hand on Michael's shoulder, replied:

"No heelers, you devils? No legs, you mean!" Then he collapsed again.

Soon all the freshmen found that their healths were now being drunk, all
the freshmen, that is, from Eton or Winchester or Harrow. Michael and
one or two others without old schoolfellows among the seniors remained
more sober. But then suddenly a gravely indolent man with a quizzical
face, who the day before in the lodge had had occasion to ask Michael
some trifling piece of information, cried "Fane!" raising his glass.
Michael blushed, blessed his unknown acquaintance inwardly and drank
what was possibly the sincerest sentiment of the evening. Other senior
men hearing his name, followed suit, even the great Marjoribanks
himself; and soon Michael was very nearly as full as Lonsdale. An
immense elation caressed his soul, a boundless sense of communal life, a
conception of sublime freedom that seemed to be illimitable forever. The
wine was over. Down the narrow stone stairs everybody poured. At the
foot on the right was a little office--the office of Venables, the
steward of the J. C. R., the eleusinian and impenetrable sanctum of
seniority called Venner's. Wine-chartered though they were, the freshmen
did not venture even to peep round the corner of the door, but hurried
out into the cloisters, where they walked arm-in-arm shouting.

Michael could have fancied himself at a gathering of mediaeval witches.
The moon temporarily clouded over by the autumnal fog made the corbels
and gargoyles and sculptured figures above the cloisters take on a
grotesque vivacity