was a very different emotion from that which wrung him when his old
pupils, one by one, gave up their youth and hope in the service of their
country. That indeed was a passionate pity, a pity full of remorseful
gratitude, full of great pride in their high purpose and their noble
self-sacrifice. On his mantelpiece, within arm's length of him, lay an
open book. It was a book of poems, and there were verses that the
Warden had read more than once.

"City of hope and golden dreaming."

A farewell to Oxford. It was the farewell of youth in its heyday to

"All the things we hoped to do."

And then followed the lines that pierced him now with poignant sadness
as he thought of them--

"Dreams that will never be clothed in being,
Mother, your sons have left with you."

The Warden groaned within himself. He was part of that Alma Mater; that
city left behind in charge of that sacred gift!

He loathed himself, and this deep self-humiliation of a scrupulous
gentleman was what his sister had shrunk from witnessing. It was this
deep humiliation that May Dashwood fled from when she hid herself in her
room that afternoon.

The Warden was not a man who spent much time in introspection. He had no
subtlety of self-analysis, but what insight he had was spent in
condemning himself, not in justifying himself. But now he added this to
his self-accusations, that if May Dashwood had not suddenly stepped
across his path and revealed to him true womanhood, gilded--yes, he used
that term sardonically--gilded by beauty, he might not have seen the
whole depth of his offence until now, when the crude truth about
Gwendolen was forced upon him by her letter.

The Warden sat on, crushed by the weight of his humiliation. And he had
been forgiven, he had been rescued from his own folly. His mistake had
been wiped out, his offence pardoned.

And what about Gwendolen herself? What about this poor solitary foolish
girl? What was to be her future? Swiftly she had come into his life and
swiftly gone! What, indeed, was to become of her and her life?

And so the Warden sat on till the dressing-bell rang, and then he got up
from his chair blindly.

He had been forgiven and rescued too easily. He did not deserve it. How
was it that he had dared to quote to May Dashwood those solemn, awful
words--

"And the glory of the Lord is all in all!"

It must have seemed to her a piece of arrogant self-righteousness.

And she had said: