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But John Charteris, as has been said, was in reality a trifle fagged. When everybody had removed to the Gymnasium, where the dancing was to be, and he had been delightful there, too, for a whole half-hour, he grasped with avidity at his first chance to slip away, and did so under cover of a riotous two-step.

He went out upon the Campus.

He found this lawn untenanted, unless you chose to count the marble figure of Lord Penniston, made aerial and fantastic by the moonlight, standing as it it were on guard over the College. Mr. Charteris chose to count him. Whimsically, Mr. Charteris reflected that this battered nobleman’s was the one familiar face he had exhumed in all Fairhaven. And what a deal of mirth and folly, too, the old fellow must have witnessed during his two hundred and odd years of sentry-duty! On warm, clear nights like this, in particular, when by ordinary there were only couples on the Campus, each couple discreetly remote from any of the others. Then Penniston would be aware of most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. “Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!” one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth’s was a pleasant lunacy. . . .

Thus Charteris reflected, growing drowsy. She said, “You spoke very well to-night. Is it too late for congratulations?”

Turning, Mr. Charteris remarked, “As you are perfectly aware, all that I vented was just a deal of skimble-scamble stuff, a verbal syllabub of balderdash. No, upon reflection, I think I should rather describe it as a conglomeration of piffle, patriotism and pyrotechnics. Well, Madam Do-as-you-would-be-done-by, what would you have? You must give people what they want.”

It was characteristic that he faced Pauline Romeyne–or was it still Romeyne? he wondered–precisely as if it had been fifteen minutes, rather than as many years, since they had last spoken together.

“Must one?” she asked. “Oh, yes, I know you have always thought that, but I do not quite see the necessity of it.”

She sat upon the bench beside Lord Penniston’s square marble pedestal. “And all the while you spoke I was thinking of those Saturday nights when your name was up for an oration or a debate before the Eclectics, and you would stay away and pay the fine rather than brave an audience.”

“The tooth of Time,” he reminded her, “has since then written wrinkles on my azure brow. The years slip away fugacious, and Time that brings forth her children only to devour them grins most hellishly, for Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony,–and, therefore, why shouldn’t I have changed a trifle? You wouldn’t have me put on exhibition as a lusus naturae?“

“Oh, but I wish you had not altered so entirely!” Pauline sighed.

“At least, you haven’t,” he declared. “Of course, I would be compelled to say so, anyhow. But in this happy instance courtesy and veracity come skipping arm-in-arm from my elated lips.” And, indeed, it seemed to him that Pauline was marvelously little altered. “I wonder now,” he said, and cocked his head, “I wonder now whose wife I am talking to?”

“No, Jack, I never married,” she said quietly.

“It is selfish of me,” he said, in the same tone, “but I am glad of that.”

And so they sat a while, each thinking.

“I wonder,” said Pauline, with that small plaintive voice which Charteris so poignantly remembered, “whether it is always like this? Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death ALWAYS provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?”

And again there was a pause which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent.