Hard, I repeat, to think that the feminine instinct, however unsophisticated, would make no guess, as time went on, at the state of the poor young undergraduate’s heart. But this is just the kind of point at which good women, in every class, are prone to innocent casuistry. At all events, Dinah Thurston and her aunt gave no outward sign of intelligence. The old lady took her daily shillings and sixpences with commercial gravity. Dinah cut the flowers or tied up little hunches of cress and radishes in a convenient form for Geff to carry. So, as in a new garden of Eden without a threat of the serpent’s coming, matters progressed for yet another fortnight. Lesser Cheriton lies at a junction of rough Cambridgeshire lanes; a village girt round by blossoming orchards in May, by sheets of black water or blacker ice in December. In addition to its rectory and seven public-houses, it contains a score or two of the thatched, high-shouldered cottages common to this part of England. Being untraversed by any of the Maid’s Causeways, Lesser Cheriton lies somewhat out of the ordinary undergraduate track. Geoffrey had no intimate friend in the University save Gaston Arbuthnot, whose time was quite otherwise occupied than in watching the comings and goings of his simple scholar cousin. He was known to be a hard-working man who took his daily walk from duty and without companionship. But for an after-dinner stupidity--a turning missed--the little love drama would probably have unfolded itself with commonplace speed, and Geoffrey have gained a wife, for I cannot think Dinah’s unoccupied fancy would, at the age of eighteen, have been hard to win. The turning, however, _was_ missed--thus. Just as Geff, his hands filled with flowers, was parting from the girl, one hushed and radiant evening, there came a rush of wheels--he could hear it now, dreaming over the past on this Guernsey moorland, and the blood rose to Geff’s face at the remembrance--a rush of wheels down the slumbering street of Lesser Cheriton. For a few seconds the sound was muffled by the ivied churchyard wall where the road wound abruptly. Then, at a slapping pace, trotted past a high-stepping bay, of which Gaston Arbuthnot was for the moment the possessor, also Gaston Arbuthnot, in his well-appointed cart, returning to Alma Mater, with a brace of rich Jesus friends, after spending the afternoon at Ely. Lesser Cheriton does not lie on the road between Ely and Cambridge. Lesser Cheriton, we may boldly say, lies on the road nowhere. But these young gentlemen were in the adventure-seeking, after-dinner mood, when a devious turning of any kind is taken with pleasant ease. And here, on their wrong road, and in Lesser Cheriton’s one street, they found themselves.