ich he brooded like a melancholy spectator of ruins. He
must not be hard on Michael, who had not yet touched life, when for
himself the vision of Pauline was wreathing this old room with starry
blooms of wild rose. The letter was finished, and Guy went out to drop
it in the pillar-box. His old college brooded at him across the road;
to-morrow Pauline would get his letter; to-night there would be rain;
to-morrow Pauline would get his letter! The envelope, as it shuffled
down into the letter-box, seemed to say "yes."

When Guy was back in the funny St. Giles room, he decided there was
something rather finely ascetic about Michael seated there and reading
imperturbably in the lamplight. His courteously fatigued manner was
merely that of the idealist who had overreached himself; there was
nothing bilious about him, not even so much cynicism as had slightly
chilled Guy's own career at Oxford; rather did there emanate from
Michael a kind of medieval steadfastness comparable only to those stone
faces that look calmly down upon the transitory congregations of their
church. Michael had this solemn presence that demanded an upward look,
and once again an upward look, until without conversation the solemnity
became a little disquieting. Guy felt bound to interrupt with
light-hearted talk of his own that slow, still gaze across the
lampshine.

"Dash it, Michael! don't brood there like a Memento Mori. Put away Magna
Charta and talk to me. You used to talk."

"_You_ talk, Guy. You've been living alone all this time. You must have
a great deal to say."

So Guy flung theories of rhyme and meter to overwhelm Magna Charta; and,
next day, he and Michael walked all over Oxford in the rain, he himself
still talking. The day after there came with the sun a letter from
Pauline which he took away with him to read in the garden of St. John's,
leaving Michael to Magna Charta.

There was nobody on the lawn, and Guy sat down on a wooden seat in air
that was faintly perfumed by the precocious blooms of a lilac breaking
to this unusual warmth of April. Unopened the letter rested in his hand;
for his name written in this girlish charactery took on the romantic
look of a name in an old tale. A breathlessness was in the air, such as
had brooded upon Pauline's first kiss; and Guy sat marmoreal and rapt in
an ecstasy of anticipation that he would never have from any other
letter; so still he was that an alighting blackbird slipped over the
grass al