“If you are free and in College during the next half-hour or so, may I come round and look you up?”

“Yes, do,” said Harriet, lamely, “that would be delightful.” She pulled herself together. “I suppose it’s no good asking you to lunch?”

It appeared that he was lunching with the Master, and that one of the All Souls men was lunching also. In fact, a little lunch-party with, she gathered some kind of historical basis, with mention of somebody’s article for the Proceedings of Something or Other, which Wimsey was going to “step into All Souls and look at-it won’t take you ten minutes,” and references to the printing and distribution of Reformation polemical pamphlets-to Wimsey’s expert knowledge-to the other man’s expert knowledge-and to the inexpert pretence at knowledge of some historian from another university.

Then the whole group broke up. The Master raised his cap and drifted away, reminding Wimsey and the historian that lunch would be at 1:15; Peter said something to Harriet about being “round in twenty minutes,” and then vanished with the two Fellows into Oll Souls, and Harriet and the Dean were walking together again.

“Well!” said the Dean, “so that’s the man.”

“Yes,” said Harriet weakly, “that’s him.”

“My dear, he’s perfectly charming. You never said he was coming to Oxford.”

“I didn’t know. I thought he was in Warsaw. I knew he was supposed to be coming up some time this term to see his nephew, but I’d no idea he could get away so soon. As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask him-only I don’t suppose he could have got my letter-”

She felt that her efforts at explanation were only darkening counsel. In the end she made a clean breast of the whole affair to the Dean.

“I don’t know whether he got my letter and knows already, or whether, if he doesn’t, I ought to tell him. I know he’s absolutely safe. But whether the Warden and the S.C.R.-I didn’t expect him to turn up like this.”

“I should think it was the wisest thing you could have done,” said Miss Martin. “I shouldn’t say too much at College. Bring him along if he’ll come, and let him turn the whole lot of us inside out. A man with manners like that could twist the whole High Table round his little finger. What a mercy he’s a historian-that will put him on the right side of Miss Hillyard.”

“I never thought of him as a historian.”

“Well, he took a First, anyway… didn’t you know?”

She had not known. She had not even troubled to wonder. She had never consciously connected Wimsey and Oxford in her mind. This was the Foreign Office business all over again. If he had realized her thoughtlessness it must have hurt him.

She saw herself as a monster of callous ingratitude.

“I’m told he was looked upon as one of the ablest scholars of his year,” pursued the Dean. “A. L. Smith thought highly of him. It’s a pity, in a way, he didn’t stick to History-but naturally, his chief interests wouldn’t be academic.”

“No,” said Harriet.

So the Dean had been making inquiries. Naturally, she would. Probably the whole S.C.R. could by now give her detailed information about Wimsey’s University career. That was comprehensible enough: they thought along those lines. But she herself might surely have found the energy for two minutes’ study of the Calendar.

“Where shall I put him when he comes? I suppose if I take him off to my own room it will set a bad example to the students. And it is a bit cramped.”

“You can have my sitting-room. Much better than any of the public rooms, if you’re going to discuss this beastly business. I wonder if he did get that letter. Perhaps the eager interest behind that penetrating eye was due to his suspicions of me. And I put it all down to my personal fascination! The man’s dangerous, though he doesn’t look it.”

“That’s why he’s dangerous. But if he read my letter, he’ll know that it isn’t you.”

Some minor confusions were cleared up when they reached College and found a note from Peter in Harriet’s pigeon-hole. It explained that he had reached London early on Saturday afternoon and found Harriet’s letter waiting for him at the Foreign Office. “I tried to ring you, but left no name, as I did not know whether you wanted me to appear personally in this matter.” He had been engaged in London that afternoon, motored to Oxford for dinner, been captured by some Balliol friends and kindly invited by the Master to stay the night, and would call “some time tomorrow” in the hope of finding her in.

So she waited in the Dean’s room, idly watching the summer sun play through the branches of the plane-tree in the New Quad and make a dancing pattern upon the plinth, until she heard his knock. When she said “Come in!” the commonplace formula seemed to take on a startling significance. For good or evil, she had called in something explosive from the outside world to break up the ordered tranquillity of the place; she had sold the breach to an alien force; she had sided with London against Oxford and with the world against the cloister.

But when he entered, she knew that the image had been a false one. He came into the quiet room as though he belonged there, and had never belonged to any other place.

“Hullo-ullo!” he said, with a faint echo of the old, flippant manner. Then he stripped off his gown and tossed it on the couch beside her own, laying his mortar-board on the table.

“I found your note when I got back. So you did get my letter?”

“Yes; I’m sorry you should have had all this bother. It seemed to me, as I was coming to Oxford in any case, I had better push along and see you. I meant to come round yesterday evening, but I got tied up with people-and I thought perhaps I had better announce myself first.”

“It was good of you to come. Sit down.”

She pulled an arm-chair forward, and he dropped into it rather heavily. She noticed, with a curious little prick of anxiety, how the clear light picked out the angles of the skull on jaw and temple.

“Peter! You look tired to death. What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Talking,” he said, discontentedly. “Words, words, words. All these interminable weeks. I’m the professional funny man of the Foreign Office. You didn’t know that? Well, I am. Not often, but waiting in the wings if wanted. Some turn goes wrong-some Under-Secretary’s secretary with small discretion and less French uses an ill-considered phrase in an after-dinner speech, and they send on the patter-comedian to talk the house into a good humour again. I take people out to lunch and tell them funny stories and work them up to mellowing point. God! what a game!”

“I didn’t know this, Peter. I’ve just discovered that I’ve been too selfish even to try and know anything. But it isn’t like you to sound so dreadfully discouraged. You look-”

“Spare me, Harriet. Don’t say I’m getting to look my age. That won’t do An eternal childishness is my one diplomatic asset.”

“You only look as though you hadn’t slept for weeks.”

“I’m not sure that I have, now you mention it. I thought-at one point we all thought-something might be going to happen. All the old, filthy uproar. I got as far as saying to Bunter one night: ‘It’s coming; it’s here; back to the Army again, sergeant.’… But in the end, you know, it made a noise like a hoop and rolled away-for the moment.”

“Thanks to the comic crosstalk?”

“Oh, no. Great Scott, no. Mine was a very trivial affair. Slight frontier skirmish. Don’t get it into your head that I’m the man who saved the Empire.”

“Then who did?”

“Dunno. Nobody knows. Nobody ever does know, for certain. The old bus wobbles one way, and you think, ‘That’s done it!’ and then it wobbles the other way and you think, ‘All serene’; and then, one day, it wobbles over too far and you’re in the soup and can’t remember how you got there.”