It was a situation meet for one of those paragraphic poems beginning “_The solemn greybeard lecturer drones on_;” and after a few more lines of subtly satirical description some dots and a fresh start: “_Sudden a blackbird calls.... Ah sweet! Who heeds?_” No one heeds. Attention to greybeards has made everyone insensible to blackbirds. The conclusion would develop neatly along those lines. A year or two ago, how fervently you would have written, how complacently desired to publish that sort of thing! No regret could be quite so sickly as that with which one wished out of existence the published record of last year’s errors of taste. ‘My dear, he’s the sort of person who’d _make arrangements_ to have his juvenilia published after his death.’ That was the sort of condemnatory label Tony and his friends would attach, spreading their hands, leaving it at that. ‘Oh, Roddy, where are you? Why do you never come?’ He flashed into mind,--leaning idly against the mantelpiece, listening with an obscure smile to Tony’s conversation. It was the sort of evening on which anything might happen. Excitement took her suddenly by the throat and made her feeble and tingling to her finger-tips. The last of the light fell lingeringly on the grey stone window-frame. If the gold bloom lasted till you counted fifty, it would be a good omen. One, two, three, four and so on to twenty, thirty, forty ... crushing the temptation to count faster than her own heartbeats ... forty-five ... fifty. It was still there, vanishing softly, but with a margin of at least another twenty to spare. The ecstasy grew, making her stomach feel drained and helpless and beating in odd pulses all over her. She bent over the desk, pretending to write, and making shaky pencil marks. Somebody got up and switched on the light; and all at once darkness had fallen outside, and the window-pane was a purple-blue blank. Roddy was in Tony’s room, leaning against the mantelpiece, quite near. She would pass Tony’s staircase on her way out: it was the one in the corner, facing the Chapel. She had seen his name every time she went by. Once she had met him coming out of the doorway, and he had looked through her; and once as she passed, someone in the court had shouted ‘Tony’! and he had leaned from his high window to reply. Oh, this intolerable lecture! Suddenly it was over. She came out and saw the bulk of King’s Chapel in the deep twilight with its row of buttresses rising up pale, like giant ghosts. ‘Oh, I’ve left my essay behind in the lecture room. I must go back. Don’t wait for me.’ She went back a few steps until the gloom had swallowed them, and waited alone in the dark court. There was a light in Tony’s window. Lingeringly she crept towards it and paused beneath it, stroking the wall. She lifted her head and cried speechlessly: ‘Oh come! Come!’ Nobody came and looked out through the uncurtained pane. Nobody came running down the stairs.