hemselves time to rush back to their lodgings and
dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The
dinner, however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their
white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy,
unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had
more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the
Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she
must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like
the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could
not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe
of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the
thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the
arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and a
centre of influence over thousands of English lives.

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's
gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young
faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's
sermon, with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and
phrase--simplicities suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined
experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--completed
the general impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She came out,
tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She, too, like the
generations before her, had launched her venture into the deep. Her boy
was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she could but watch
him from the shore. Brought into contact with this imposing University
organization, with all its suggestions of virile energies and functions,
the mother suddenly felt herself insignificant and forsaken. He had been
her all, her own, and now on this training-ground of English youth, it
seemed to her that the great human society had claimed him from her.

CHAPTER V.

In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most
stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He
was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural gift of sympathy,
which was no doubt often abused, and by no means invariably profitable
to its owner, but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows,
like the power of half the