with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was

obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands

still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One

of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond

curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a

refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie

of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,

and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There

were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one

father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old

school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and

consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters

were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable

humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very

gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers

with daughters-daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,

and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and

regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,

all the time, though not formally absent.

Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,

where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and

the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and

croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of

rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.

Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted

and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl-Gertrude had found a

disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a

state of gentle revival-while their mother exercised a divided

chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,

stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and

preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous

resumption of stirring.

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was

a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret

had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her

breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness

of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and

personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic

about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing

himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story

illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-

minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on

the way to Grantchester.

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh

fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow

always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy

but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an

even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a

lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.

"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under

the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down."

(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them-at the

Pitti and the Brera,-the Brera is wonderful-wonderful places,-but

it isn't like real study," she was saying presently… "We

bought bales of photographs," she said.

I thought the bales a little out of keeping.

But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully

dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,

and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a

different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-

coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed

translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her

slender body was a grace to me.

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest

and please her as well as I knew how.

We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of

Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit-he had given a talk to

Bennett Hall also-and our impression of him.

"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.

I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter

of social progress, and she listened-oh! with a kind of urged

attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The

little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and

general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and

intelligent.

"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm

glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from

the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a

state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady