There is another little pause, again filled by the lark's crowding notes. There are two words battering against the gate of Burgoyne's lips for egress--two words that he dares not utter. "And Elizabeth?" She was the eldest. She would naturally have been mentioned first; but neither first nor last is there any speech of her. She must, then, be dead--dead long ago, too; for there is no trace of mourning in her parents' dress. Elizabeth is dead--bright Elizabeth, the beauty and the pet! Charles Lamb's tender lines come pensively back to him-- "My sprightly neighbour gone before To that unknown and silent shore, Shall we not meet as heretofore, Some summer morning?" Is it only fancy that he sees in the eye of Elizabeth's mother a dread lest he shall ask tidings of her, as she says, hastily, and with a smile, "Well, I am afraid we must be going; it has been very pleasant meeting you again, but I am afraid that the Warden will be expecting us"? She adds to her parting hand-shake no wish for a repetition of that meeting, and he watches them down the Willow Walk with a sort of sadness in his heart. "Elizabeth is dead! Elizabeth is undoubtedly dead!" CHAPTER III. "Do you know that Willy has been sent down again?" Six weeks have passed since Burgoyne's eye followed his quondam friends down Mesopotamia, and he is not in Oxford now. He left it, indeed, twenty-four hours after the rencounter described; left it with something of a determination never to revisit it. This, too, in spite of the good Brown's vociferously reiterated invitation to him to run down for another Sunday, whenever he should feel inclined, and which he accepted civilly, knowing that he should never feel inclined. At the present moment he is pacing up and down the still wintry, north-windswept walks of a country-house garden in Shropshire, in the company of a lady whom he has known as long as he can remember; a lady who would have been a friend of circumstance, even if she had not been one of choice, since her home has been in the immediate neighbourhood of the only one he has ever had; a lady whose friendship he has tested by letters on thin paper from New Guinea and Central Africa all about himself; at whose feet he has laid on his return more heads, and skins, and claws than she has well known what to do with; whose husband he thought a very good fellow, and to whom he wrote a very nice letter on that husband's death; lastly, concerning whose only child has been made the communication that opens this chapter--"Do you know that Willy has been sent down again?" "I did not know it; but I am very sorry now that I do know." "You need not be," returns she cheerfully; "he does not mind it in the least; indeed, happily for him, most of his friends have been sent down too." "What has he been doing this time? Putting the porter into the fountain? or screwing up the Dean? or what other playful little pleasantry?"