the sudden softening of her eyes.

He saw--he felt her--yielding.

"You'll come?"

"I--I suppose I may as well ride in Lathom Woods as anywhere else. You
have a key?"

"The groom will have it. I meet you there."

She flushed a bright pink.

"That might have been left vague!"

"How are you to find your way through those woods without a guide?" he
protested.

She was silent a moment, then she said with decision:

"I must overtake my people."

"You shall. I want you to talk to my mother--and--you have still to
introduce me to your aunt and cousins."

Mirth crept into her eyes. The process of taming him had begun.

* * * * *

Falloden on the way back to his lodgings handed over his family to the
tender offices of Meyrick and a couple of other gilded youths, who had
promised to look after them for the evening. They were to dine at the
Randolph, and go to a college concert. Falloden washed his hands of
them, and shut himself up for five or six hours' grind, broken only by a
very hasty meal. The thought of Constance hovered about him--but his
will banished it. Will and something else--those aptitudes of brain
which determined his quick and serviceable intelligence.

When after his frugal dinner he gave himself in earnest to the article
in a French magazine, on a new French philosopher, which had been
recommended to him by his tutor as likely to be of use to him in his
general philosophy paper, his mind soon took fire; Constance was
forgotten, and he lost himself in the splendour shed by the original and
creative thought of a great man, climbing, under his guidance, as the
night wore on, from point to point, and height to height, amid the
Oxford silence, broken only by the chiming bells, and a benighted
footfall in the street outside, until he seemed to have reached the
bounds of the phenomenal and to be close on that outer vastness whence
stream the primal forces--_Die Muetter_--as Goethe called them--whose
play is with the worlds.

Then by way of calming the brain before sleep, he fell upon some notes
to be copied and revised, on the "Religious Aspects of Greek Drama," and
finally amused himself with running through an ingenious "Memoria
Technica" on the 6th Book of the Ethics which he had made for himself
during the preceding winter.

Then work was done, and he threw it from him with the same energy as
that wherewith he had banished the remembrance of Constance some hours