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III

He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.

On the Monday, John Lefolle was good-naturedly giving a special audience to a muscular dunce, trying to explain to him the political effects of the Crusades, when there was a knock at the sitting-room door, and the scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly dressed in white, and stood in the open doorway, smiling–an embodiment of the summer he was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue was paralysed. The dunce became suddenly important–a symbol of the decorum he had been outraging. His soul, torn so abruptly from history to romance, could not get up the right emotion. Why this imprudence of Winifred’s? She had been so careful heretofore.

‘What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!’ she said gaily.

He laughed. The spell was broken. ‘Yes, the heap to be cleaned is rather obtrusive,’ he said, ‘but I suppose it is a sort of tradition.’

‘I think I’ve got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir.’ The dunce rose and smiled, and his tutor realized how little the dunce had to learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.

‘Oh, well, you’ll come and see me again after lunch, won’t you, if one or two points occur to you for elucidation,’ he said, feeling vaguely a liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce, Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an instant. He had scarcely time to realize that this wonderful thing had happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and was examining a Thucydides upside down.

‘How clever to know Greek!’ she exclaimed. ‘And do you really talk it with the other dons?’

‘No, we never talk shop,’ he laughed. ‘But, Winifred, what made you come here?’

‘I had never seen Oxford. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘There’s nothing beautiful here,’ he said, looking round his sober study.

‘No,’ she admitted; ‘there’s nothing I care for here,’ and had left another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. ‘And now you must take me to lunch and on the river.’

He stammered, ‘I have–work.’

She pouted. ‘But I can’t stay beyond tomorrow morning, and I want so much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising.’

‘You are not staying over the night?’ he gasped.

‘Yes, I am,’ and she threw him a dazzling glance.

His heart went pit-a-pat. ‘Where?’ he murmured.

‘Oh, some poky little hotel near the station. The swell hotels are full.’

He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.

‘So many people have come down already for Commem,’ he said. ‘I suppose they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees. But hadn’t we better go somewhere and lunch?’

They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and across the quad. He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness. After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce’s punt. The necessities of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel uncomfortable again. But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river, applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the rippling reflections in the water.

‘Look, look!’ she cried once, pointing skyward. He stared upwards, expecting a balloon at least. But it was only ‘Keats’ little rosy cloud’, she explained. It was not her fault if he did not find the excursion unreservedly idyllic.