reply was passionately prompt.

Nora looked thoughtful.

"Perhaps you don't know whether you were or not. Girls get so dreadfully
mixed up. But I am sure people--men--have been in love with you."

"Well, of course!" said Connie, with the same emphatic gaiety.

Nora opened her eyes.

"'Of course?' But I know heaps of girls with whom nobody has ever been
in love!"

As soon as she was alone, Connie locked her door, and walked restlessly
up and down her room, till by sheer movement she had tamed a certain
wild spirit within her let loose by Nora's question. And as she walked,
the grey Oxford walls, the Oxford lilacs and laburnums, vanished from
perception. She was in another scene. Hot sun--gleaming orange-gardens
and blue sea--bare-footed, black-eyed children--and a man beside
her, on whom she has been showering epithets that would have
shamed--surely!--any other human being in the world. Tears of excitement
are in her eyes; in his a laughing triumph mixed with astonishment.

"But, now--" she thinks, drawing herself up, erect and tense, her hands
behind her head; "now, I am ready for him. Let him try such ways
again--if he dare!"

CHAPTER III

The party given at St. Hubert's on this evening in the Eights week was
given in honour of a famous guest--the Lord Chancellor of the day, one
of the strongest members of a strong Government, of whom St. Hubert's,
which had nurtured him through his four academic years, was quite
inordinately proud. It was very seldom that their great nursling was
able or willing to revisit the old nest. But the head of the college,
who had been in the same class-list and rowed in the same boat with the
politician, was now Vice-Chancellor of the University; and the greater
luminary had come to shine upon the lesser, by way of heightening the
dignity of both. For the man who has outsoared his fellows likes to
remind himself by contrast of his callow days, before the hungry and
fighting impulses had driven him down--a young eaglet--upon the
sheepfolds of law and politics; while to the majority of mankind, even
to-day, hero-worship, when it is not too exacting, is agreeable.

So all Oxford had been bidden. The great hall of St. Hubert's, with its
stately portraits and its emblazoned roof, had been adorned with flowers
and royally lit up. From the hills round Oxford the "line of festal
light" made by its Tudor windows, in which gleamed the escutcheons of
three centuries, could have been pl