“It is your cousin, not the Lord Chancellor, who is the guest of the evening!” laughed Herbert Pryce, who had made his way back at last to Alice Hooper. “I never saw such a success!” Alice tossed her head in a petulant silence; and a madrigal by the college choir checked any further remarks from Mr. Pryce. After the madrigal came a general move for refreshments, which were set out in the college library and in the garden. The Lord Chancellor must needs offer his arm to his host’s sister, and lead the way. The Warden followed, with the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, and the hall began to thin. Lord Glaramara looked back, smiling and beckoning to Constance, as though to say—“Don’t altogether desert me!” But a voice—a tall figure—interposed— “Lady Constance, let me take you into the garden? It’s much nicer than upstairs.” A slight shiver ran, unseen, through the girl’s frame. She wished to say no; she tried to say no. And instead she looked up—haughty, but acquiescent. “Very well.” And she followed Douglas Falloden through the panelled passage outside the hall leading to the garden. Sorell, who had hurried up to find her, arrived in time to see her disappearing through the lights and shadows of the moonlit lawn. “We can do this sort of thing pretty well, can’t we? It’s banal because it happens every year, and because it’s all mixed up with salmon mayonnaise, and cider-cup—and it isn’t banal, because it’s Oxford!” [Illustration: Constance sat in the shadow of a plane-tree with Falloden at her feet] Constance was sitting under the light shadow of a plane-tree, not yet fully out; Falloden was stretched on the grass at her feet. Before her ran a vast lawn which had taken generations to make; and all round it, masses of flowering trees, chestnuts, lilacs, laburnums, now advancing, now receding, made inlets or promontories of the grass, turned into silver by the moonlight. At the furthest edge, through the pushing pyramids of chestnut blossom and the dim drooping gold of the laburnums, could be seen the bastions and battlements of the old city wall, once a fighting reality, now tamed into the mere ornament and appendage of this quiet garden. Over the trees and over the walls rose the spires and towers of a wondrous city; while on the grass, or through the winding paths disappearing into bosky distances, flickered white dresses, and the slender forms of young men and maidens. A murmur of voices rose and fell on the warm night air; the sound of singing—the thin sweetness of boyish notes—came from the hall, whose decorated windows, brightly lit, shone out over the garden. “It’s Oxford—and it’s Brahms,” said Constance. “I seem to have known it all before in music: the trees—the lawn—the figures—appearing and disappearing—the distant singing—”