purt of work before
the musical exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might rouse
him, and gild the return to Oxford.

CHAPTER XIX

"Have some tea, old man, and warm up," said Falloden, on his knees
before a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to improve.

"What do you keep such a climate for?" growled Radowitz, as he hung
shivering over the grate.

Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously.
The bright red patches on the boy's cheeks, and his dry, fevered look,
his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears in
the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and felt
himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the London
doctors on the whole had been reassuring. The slight hemorrhage of the
summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of active
mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the nervous
shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which had
followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had
pressed hard for sunshine and open-air--the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers.
But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn't and wouldn't go alone,
and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the
way. Falloden's first bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was
tied to St. Cyprian's; and every other companion so far proposed had
been rejected with irritation.

Unluckily, on this day of his return, the Oxford skies had put on again
their characteristic winter gloom. The wonderful fortnight of frost and
sun was over; tempests of wind and deluges of rain were drowning it fast
in flood and thaw. The wind shrieked round the little cottage, and
though it was little more than three o'clock, darkness was coming fast.

Falloden could not keep still. Having made up the fire, he brought in a
lamp himself; he drew the curtains, then undrew them again, apparently
that he might examine a stretch of the Oxford road just visible through
the growing dark; or he wandered in and out of the room, his hands in
his pockets whistling. Otto watched him with a vague annoyance. He
himself was horribly tired, and Falloden's restlessness got on
his nerves.

At last Falloden said abruptly, pausing in front of him--

"You'll have some visitors directly!"

Otto looked up. The gaiety in Falloden's eyes informed him, and at the
same time, wounded him.

"L