It was early--half-past eight--and no one except Prescott, a sophomore, and Wynne, a junior, had dropped in as yet. Wynne, with his spectacles on, was sitting in the chair he always sat in at that hour, reading the morning paper. Thorn knew that he would read it through from beginning to end, carefully put his spectacles back in their case, and then go to the piano and play the “Blue Danube.” By that time his eggs and coffee would be served. Wynne did this every morning, and the instructor, who at the beginning of the year had regarded the boy’s methodical habits at the club as “quaint,”--suggestive, somehow, of the first chapter of “Pendennis,”--felt this morning that the “Blue Danube” before breakfast would be in the nature of a last straw. Prescott, looking as fresh and clean as the morning, was laughing over an illustrated funny paper. He merely nodded to Thorn, although the instructor hadn’t breakfasted there for many months, and called him across to enjoy something. Thorn glanced at the paper and smiled feebly. “I don’t see how you can do it at this hour,” he said; “I would as soon drink flat champagne.” Prescott understood but vaguely what the man was talking about, yet he didn’t appear disturbed or anxious for enlightenment. “I’ll have my breakfast on the piazza,” Thorn said to the steward who answered his ring. Then he walked nervously out of the room. From the piazza he could look over a tangled barrier of lilac bushes and trellised grapevines into an old-fashioned garden. A slim lady in a white dress and a broad brimmed hat that hid her face was cutting nasturtiums and humming placidly to herself. Thorn thought she was a young girl, until she turned and revealed the fact that she was not a young girl--that she was about his own age. This seemed to annoy him in much the same way that the robins and Wynne and the funny paper had, for he threw himself into a low steamer-chair where he wouldn’t have to look at the woman, and gave himself up to a sort of luxurious melancholy. In October, nine months before, Thorn had appeared one evening in the doorway of the club dining-room after a more or less continuous absence of eight years from Cambridge. It was the night before college opened, and the dining-room was crowded. For an instant there was an uproar of confused greetings; then Haydock and Ellis and Sears Wolcott and Wynne--the only ones Thorn knew--pushed back from the table and went forward to shake hands with him. Of the nine or ten boys still left at the table by this proceeding, those whose backs were turned to the new arrival stopped eating and waited without looking around, to be introduced to the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Their companions opposite paused too; some of them laid their napkins on the table. They, however, could glance up and see that the newcomer was a dark man of thirty years or more. They supposed, correctly, that he was an “old graduate” and a member of the club.