wenty minutes, he and Lord Risborough having been frequent
correspondents on matters of scholarship for some years. And Lady
Risborough had chattered and smiled her way through the Master's lonely
house--he had only just been appointed head of his college and was then
unmarried--leaving a deep impression.

"I must make friends with her," he thought, following Ella Risborough's
daughter with his eyes. "There are some gaps to fill up."

He meant in the circle of his girl protegees. For the Master had a
curious history, well known in Oxford. He had married a cousin of his
own, much younger than himself; and after five years they had separated,
for reasons undeclared. She was now dead, and in his troubled blue eyes
there were buried secrets no one would ever know. But under what
appeared to a stranger to be a harsh, pedantic exterior the Master
carried a very soft heart and an invincible liking for the society of
young women. Oxford about this time was steadily filling with girl
students, who were then a new feature in its life. The Master was a kind
of queer patron saint among them, and to a chosen three or four, an
intimate mentor and lasting friend. His sixty odd years, and the streaks
of grey in his red straggling locks, his European reputation as a
scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet house, forbade the
slightest breath of scandal in connection with these girl-friendships.
Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself, whose essays he read,
whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he watched over, and in whose
subsequent love affairs he took the liveliest interest, were rarely or
never plain to look upon. He chose them for their wits, but also for
their faces. His men friends observed it with amusement. The little
notes he wrote them, the birthday presents he sent them--generally some
small worn copy of a French or Latin classic--his coveted invitations,
or congratulations, were all marked by a note of gallantry, stately and
old-fashioned like the furniture of his drawing-room, but quite
different from anything he ever bestowed upon the men students of
his college.

Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites. One, a delicious
creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing
verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he
really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband; and
the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest han