t finished a solitary luncheon in the little dining-room
of the Boar's Hill cottage. There was a garden door in the room, and
lighting a cigarette, he passed out through it to the terrace outside. A
landscape lay before him, which has often been compared to that of the
Val d'Arno seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common points with
that incomparable mingling of man's best with the best of mountain and
river. It was the last week of October, and the autumn was still warm
and windless, as though there were no shrieking November to come.
Oxford, the beautiful city, with its domes and spires, lay in the hollow
beneath the spectator, wreathed in thin mists of sunlit amethyst. Behind
that ridge in the middle distance ran the river and the Nuneham woods;
beyond rose the long blue line of the Chilterns. In front of the cottage
the ground sank through copse and field to the river level, the hedge
lines all held by sentinel trees, to which the advancing autumn had
given that significance the indiscriminate summer green denies. The
gravely rounded elms with their golden caps, the scarlet of the beeches,
the pale lemon-yellow of the nearly naked limes, the splendid blacks of
yew and fir--they were all there, mingled in the autumn cup of misty
sunshine like melting jewels. And among them, the enchanted city shone,
fair and insubstantial, from the depth below; as it were, the spiritual
word and voice of all the scene.

Falloden paced up and down the terrace, smoking and thinking. That was
Otto's open window. But Radowitz had not yet appeared that morning, and
the ex-scout, who acted butler and valet to the two men, had brought
word that he would come down in the afternoon, but was not to be
disturbed till then.

"What lunacy made me do it?" thought Falloden, standing still at the end
of the terrace which fronted the view.

He and Radowitz had been nearly three weeks together. Had he been of the
slightest service or consolation to Radowitz during that time? He
doubted it. That incalculable impulse which had made him propose himself
as Otto's companion for the winter still persisted indeed. He was
haunted still by a sense of being "under command"--directed--by a force
which could not be repelled. Ill at ease, unhappy, as he was, and
conscious of being quite ineffective, whether as nurse or companion,
unless Radowitz proposed to "throw up," he knew that he himself should
hold on; though why, he could scarcely have explained.

B