The first beam has struck one of the lofty pinnacles, and made laughter and gaiety of its tercentenary gloom. Now it is laying long shadows about mead and street--shadows of noble buildings, of cropping cows, of commonplace yet dawn-ennobled houses, and of vernal trees. Far below on the bridge is the pigmy crowd, with the vulgar din of its May horns, blown thus early, in ill-survival of some Puritan custom, to drown the notes of the Latin hymn. But here, high up above the world, is no music but that august one of the loud bells; no sight but the arch of the perfect sky, and the solid grandeur of God's first best gift to man--new light. In this stately dawning they stand together, he and she, despite the crowd, virtually alone; for Prue has drawn away Freddy to point out to him what is indeed startlingly obvious, the rocking of the tower under the vibration of the bells. Several undergraduates--more indeed than not--are taking off their college caps, and flinging them down over the battlements. The wind blows colder with the sunrise, but they pay little heed to its chill admonishment. With their bare young heads they stand laughing and leaning down to watch the fate of their mortar-boards. Most alight on the college roofs; one sticks on a pinnacle, greatly to its owner's delight. There is a noise of young voices, exclamations, bets, jolly laughter, on the crisp morning air. And meanwhile Talbot and Margaret stand staring at each other, silent at first; for how from such a torrent of words as he has to pour out before her can he choose which to begin with? At last, 'I--I--did not expect to meet you here,' he says stupidly. 'Nor I you.' 'Are you staying in Oxford?' 'Yes, at the Mitre. Freddy was very anxious that we should come, and so Lady Roupell brought us.' She answers him quietly, in a rather low voice, but she does not on her side originate any question. Can it be that she is struggling with a difficulty in any degree akin to his own? Urged by this dazzling possibility; urged still more by the shortness of the time--since what security is there that Prue may not be back upon them at any moment with some fresh discovery about the tower or the bells?--he hazards a speech of greater significance, of such significance in his own eyes that he trembles almost as much as the bell-rocked tower in making it. 'At the moment I first caught sight of you, and before that, I was thinking of you.' 'Were you?' 'I suppose that there are few things in the world more unlikely than that _you_ were thinking of _me_?' She hesitates a second. He sees by a sort of distress in her sweet, candid eyes, that she would like to be able to tell him that she had been thinking of him. But she evidently had not, and is too honest to be able to feign that she had. 'I was not thinking of you at that moment,' she answers reluctantly; 'I was too much out of breath with my climb,' she adds, with a rather embarrassed laugh, 'to be thinking of anything.'