rs, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.

Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
intended to marry; for he did not desire to be left an old bachelor in
college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
question.

And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
passing, passing, passing so quickl