ober term to put down and stamp out ragging.

Falloden had replied to the Head's letter expressing his "profound
regret" for the accident to Otto Radowitz, and declaring that nobody in
the row had the smallest intention of doing him any bodily harm.

What indeed had anybody but himself to do with his own malignant and
murderous impulse towards Radowitz? It had had no casual connection
whatever with the accident itself. And who but he--and Constance
Bledlow--was entitled to know that, while the others were actuated by
nothing but the usual motives of a college rag, quickened by too much
supping, he himself had been impelled by a mad jealousy of Radowitz, and
a longing to humiliate one who had humiliated him? All the same he hated
himself now for what he had said to Constance on their last walk. It had
been a mean and monstrous attempt to shift the blame from his own
shoulders to hers; and his sense of honour turned from the recollection
of it in disgust.

How pale she had looked, beside that gate, in the evening light--how
heavy-eyed! No doubt she was seeing Radowitz constantly, and grieving
over him; blaming herself, indeed, as he, Falloden, had actually invited
her to do. With fresh poignancy, he felt himself an outcast from her
company. No doubt they sometimes talked of him--his bitter pride guessed
how!--she, and Sorell, and Radowitz together. Was Sorell winning her? He
had every chance. Falloden, in his sober senses, knew perfectly well
that she was not in love with Radowitz; though no one could say what
pity might do with a girl so sensitive and sympathetic.

Well, it was all over!--no good thinking about it. He confessed to
himself that his whole relation to Constance Bledlow had been one
blunder from beginning to end. His own arrogance and self-confidence
with regard to her, appeared to him, as he looked back upon them, not so
much a fault as an absurdity. In all his dealings with her he had been a
conceited fool, and he had lost her. "But I had to be ruined to find it
out!" he thought, capable at last of some ironic reflection on himself.

He set his horse to a gallop along the moorland turf. Let him get home,
and do his dreary tasks in that great house which was already becoming
strange to him; which, in a sense, he was now eager to see the last of.
On the morrow, the possible buyer of the pictures--who, by the way, was
not an American at all, but a German shipping millionaire from
Bremen--was coming down,