At first Billy was rather shocked. The abrupt change of manner was so hopelessly out of character; he wouldn’t have been more astounded had he heard unseemly levity issuing from the pulpit at S. Timothy’s. But he divined almost at once--who wouldn’t have?--that John’s responsibility for other people’s affairs, though exhibited in a fashion positively weird, did not diminish; and Billy frequented 86 Matthews less than ever. John knew that he himself didn’t possess the qualities that make a man an inspiration, but he had been brought up at home and at school to believe that he was something of an influence; that he was “just the sort of man a fellow like Billy needs.” Apart from the genuine sorrow he would feel at what the official college gracefully terms the “separation” of Billy from the University, it was disconcerting to John to find out that as a kindly light he had proved uncommonly dim. In despair and disappointment, he impressed Haydock into the labour of salvation. Haydock was very amiable about the whole affair. He had, whenever he was with Billy, the half amused affection an older fellow often feels for anything so young and pretty and inconsequent. He liked the boy’s mother too, although the lady’s guilelessness had always been a bar to conversation of other than a purely theoretical value. So, in response to John’s eleventh-hour prayers, he did what he could in spite of more immediate interests. He picked his way, one evening, through the darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the black alley that leads to the Polo Club,--once upon a time he too had belonged to that genial institution,--and beguiled Billy and Dilford Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about, he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself provided the opportunity. “Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. Haydock glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, but it was not yet nine; the proctor couldn’t object, no matter how excruciating Dilly’s performance might be. “Dilly, you know, can bang the box in a way that would make you throw stones at your grandmother,” explained Billy. “I’m extremely fond of my grandmother,” suggested Haydock. “What do you want?” asked Dilly, seating himself. “What do you know?” “Oh, any old thing.” Haydock was on the point of discreetly asking for a Sousa march, when Dilford plunged abruptly into the middle of a sonata, and played it through with astonishing brilliancy. “I do play well, don’t I?” he admitted, when he had finished. “It always surprises me; just think what I could do if I really studied--hard, I mean,” he added lightly.