The heartening warmth, however, did not last; and when toward evening the sun faded in a blanche of watery clouds with a cold wind for aftermath, Guy felt Michael might have been more sympathetic. Rather silently they walked back from Godstow, with Pauline between them; so that after all, Guy thought, Michael was still an undergraduate, whereas he had embarked upon life. That night, however, when the curtains were drawn across Michael's bay-window that overhung the whispering and ancient thoroughfare; when the fire burned high and the tobacco-smoke clouded the glimmer of the books on the walls; when his chair creaked with that old Oxford creaking, Guy forgave Michael for any lack in his reception of the great plan. After all, he was writing to Pauline, while his host was reading the Constitutional History of England at a table littered with heavy volumes, on which he brooded like a melancholy spectator of ruins. He must not be hard on Michael, who had not yet touched life, when for himself the vision of Pauline was wreathing this old room with starry blooms of wild rose. The letter was finished, and Guy went out to drop it in the pillar-box. His old college brooded at him across the road; to-morrow he must go and look up some of the dons; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter; to-night there would be rain; to-morrow Pauline would get his letter! The envelope, as it shuffled down into the letter-box, seemed to say 'yes'. When Guy was back in the fumy St. Giles room, he decided there was something rather finely ascetic about Michael seated there and reading imperturbably in the lamp-light. His courteously fatigued manner was merely that of the idealist who had overreached himself; there was nothing bilious about him, not even so much cynicism as had slightly chilled Guy's own career at Oxford; rather did there emanate from Michael a kind of mediaeval steadfastness comparable only to those stone faces that look calmly down upon the transitory congregations of their church. Michael had this solemn presence that demanded an upward look, and once again an upward look, until without conversation the solemnity became a little disquieting. Guy felt bound to interrupt with light-hearted talk of his own that slow still gaze across the lampshine. "Dash it, Michael, don't brood there like a Memento Mori. Put away Magna Charta and talk to me. You used to talk." "You talk, Guy. You've been living alone all this time. You must have a great deal to say." So Guy flung theories of rhyme and metre to overwhelm Magna Charta; and, next day, he and Michael walked all over Oxford in the rain, he himself still talking. The day after, there came with the sun a letter from Pauline which he took away with him to read in the garden of St. John's, leaving Michael to Magna Charta.