t could bring a man from the grave," he went on,
meeting Bingham's eyes with a smile, "why shouldn't that least ghostly
of all scholars, your old master, Jowett--why shouldn't he walk at night
when Balliol is asleep?"

"Then there was nothing in the rumour," said Bingham, "that your King's
ghost has turned up?"

"The Warden doesn't believe in ghosts," said May, looking across the
table eagerly. She remembered how he had stood by the bedside of
Gwendolen that night. She recalled the room vividly, the gloom of the
room and he alone standing in the light thrown upon him by the lamp. She
could recall every tone of his voice as he said: "You thought you saw
something. You made a mistake. You saw nothing, you imagined that you
saw--there was nothing," and how his voice convinced _her_, as she stood
by the fire and listened. How long ago was that--only three days--it
seemed like a month.

"No," said the Warden, "I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't
believe that our dead"--and he pronounced the last word reverently--"are
such that they can return to us in human form, or through the
intervention of some hired medium. But if there are ghosts in Oxford,"
he went on, and now he turned to Bingham, as if he were answering his
question--"if there are ghosts in Oxford they will be the ghosts of
those who were, in life, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. I am
thinking of those men who lived and died in Oxford, recluses who knew no
other world, and of whom the world knew nothing--men who used to flit
like shadows from their solitary rooms to the Lecture hall and to High
table and to the Common room. Those men were monks in all but name;
celibates, solitaries--men to whom the laughter of youth was maddening
pain."

May's eyes dropped! What the Warden was saying stabbed her, not merely
because of the words he said, but because his voice conveyed the sense
of that poignant pain.

"Such men as I speak of," he went on, "Oxford must always have
possessed, even in the boisterous days when you fellows of All Souls,"
he said, addressing Bingham, "used to pull your doors off their hinges
to make bonfires in honour of the mallard. There always have been these
men, students shy and sensitive, shrinking from the rougher side of the
ordinary man, shrinking from ordinary social life; men who are only
courageous in their devotion to learning and to truth; men who are
lonely with that awful loneliness of those who live in the world of