"Bilboa's Bay" has come to an end without his perceiving it. He is putting his memory through her paces, trying to find some niche in his three happy Oxford years in which to place that strangely known yet unknown figure. There is no such niche. It is not an Oxford memory at all. What is it then? An earlier or a later one? His eyebrows are drawn together in the effort of recollection, making him look, if possible, crosser than before, when he is made aware of the return of Brown by finding his arm seized, and his friend's voice--a good deal hoarser even than when they left home--in his ear, "Jim, do you feel inclined to do a very good-natured thing?" "Not in the least," replies Burgoyne promptly; "if anyone wishes to borrow £5 from me, I should advise him to choose a moment when I am drier about the legs." Burgoyne has very often stood up to and over his knees in water for hours, watching for ducks among whistling reeds on winter mornings, and never thought himself at all to be pitied; but he is thoroughly vexed now at his moist trousers. Brown, however, is not so easily rebuffed. "I should be awfully obliged to you," he says croakily; "you would be laying me under a very real obligation if you would----" He stops to cough. "If I would what?" returns the other curtly, and looking apprehensively at a book which Brown is expanding before his eyes. "If you would read instead of me." "I!" "Why, the fact is"--coughing noisily again as if to show that there is no imposition--"I suppose the fog must have got down my throat; but I find I cannot speak above a whisper. I should not be heard beyond the front row; come, old man, do a good-natured thing for once in your life." There is a pause; Burgoyne is not very fond of being asked to do a good-natured thing. He can do a big one every now and then, but he is not particularly fond of being asked to do a small one. "Surely there must be many people here much better suited for it than I am," he says presently, looking uncomfortably round in search of the little group of booked and musicked persons whom he had seen but now standing near him, but it had melted. "That is just what there are not," rejoins Brown, pressing his point with the more eagerness, as he thinks he sees signs of yielding; "we are very short of hands to-night, and my wife has just heard that the girl upon whom she was counting for a couple of songs is in bed with influenza." "Happy girl! I wish I too was in bed with influenza," says Jim sardonically, for he sees his fate about to overtake him. And so it comes to pass that, five minutes later, as described at the opening of this chapter, he is seated on the platform with "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings" before him, rows of Provident Matrons' eyes fastened expectantly upon him, and horrid qualms of strange shyness racing over him.