the gentlemen came
into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
to effect a change of partners, Ian explained that he found himself
unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
extravagance of apology for this early departure.

He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many
whispe