chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence
appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of
the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so
condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who
came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they,
without their background were themselves a little shy, although their
shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here,
however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints,
row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended
more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he
found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of
respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete.
The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive
conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society;
he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously
when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without
being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at
a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a
tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the
Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult
for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a
standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address
their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet
everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that
delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and
curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be
called anything else except Jex.

For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of
St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his
surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had
his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or
five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being
continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their
intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown
the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a