remembered a much over-rated Hebrew (possibly only a mythical
figure) who once said to His followers that when they prayed they should
say: "Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass
against us."

He got out of his gig slowly. "I don't forgive them," he said, and,
unconscious of his own sins, he walked up the steps into his lonely
house.

CHAPTER XXIII

BY MOONLIGHT

May waited within the gates of the Lodgings for some moments. She did
not open the door and enter the house. She walked up and down on the
gravelled court. She wanted to be alone, to speak to no one just now;
her heart was full of weariness and loneliness.

When she felt certain that Boreham was safely away, she went to the
gates and out into the narrow street again, where she could hear subdued
sounds of the evening traffic of the city.

The dusky streets had grown less dim; the shining overhead was more
luminous as the moon rose.

The old buildings, as she passed them on her solitary walk, looked
mysterious and aloof, as if they had been placed there magically for
some secret purpose and might vanish before the dawn. This was the
ancient Oxford, the Oxford of the past, the Oxford that was about to
pass away, leaving priceless memories of learning and romance behind it,
something that could never be again quite what it had been. Before dawn
would it vanish and something else, still called Oxford, would be
standing there in its place?

May was tempted to let her imagination wander thus, and to see in this
mysterious Oxford the symbol of the personality of a single man, a
personality that haunted her when she was alone, a personality which,
when it stood before her in flesh and blood, seemed to fill space and
obliterate other objects.

She had, in the chapel, re-affirmed over and over again her resolution
to overcome this obsession, and now, as she walked that evening, her
heart cried out for indulgence just for one brief moment, for permission
to think of this personality, and to read details of it in every moonlit
facade of old Oxford, in every turn of the time-worn lanes and passages.

The temptation had come upon her, because it was so dreary to be loved
by Boreham. His talk seemed to mark her spiritual loneliness with such
poignant insistence; it made it so desperately plain to her that those
sharp cravings of her heart could not be satisfied except by one man. It
had made her see, for the first time, that