"And now," said Mr. Wycherly, some five minutes later, wiping Montagu’s tear-stained face with a large, clean handkerchief, "we had better begin work, and you may write out the rules concerning the sequence of the tenses, that you learned yesterday." As Montagu settled himself at the stout, stumpy table, the sun shone in on him with a radiance that made him blink. And Mr. Wycherly looked round the room with the relieved expression of one who, expecting everything to be changed, found it still blessedly the same. He had played his great stake and won: and never was winner more happily relieved. When Montagu finished his morning’s lessons and went downstairs and Mr. Wycherly moved about his room dusting his books and rearranging the piles of papers on his desk, he might have been heard to sing softly and with subdued but joyful emphasis certain stanzas that always concluded with a rollicking "fal la la la la la la." Presently he went to Montagu’s window and looked out toward Arthur’s Seat. But he did not see it, for in dreams he walked in his college garden beside the bastioned city wall. "I would like to see the chestnuts in bloom once more," he said softly, "and the perfect grass." Montagu met his aunt on the staircase as he was going down and she at once noted that his face looked tear-stained and his eyelids were swollen with crying. It was so unheard of a thing that Montagu should cry during his lessons, whatever else he might cry about, that Miss Esperance stopped him to ask anxiously what had happened. The boy crimsoned to the roots of his hair. "It was about the catechism, Aunt Esperance," he said slowly. "I am sorry; I won’t be tiresome any more. "Then he _did_ speak to you?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Oh, yes!" said Montagu earnestly. "He made me _very_ sorry," and he fled past his aunt down the little crooked staircase and out into the garden, for he feared what she might ask him next, and like Elsa, when she discovered the gaps made by the missing books six years ago, the boy felt that here again was a sacrifice that "she maun never ken." The long-stilled voices of habit and tradition called loudly to Mr. Wycherly, and moving as if in a dream, he went and opened a drawer in his desk and drew from it a framed picture of his college arms. The gules were faded but the seeded Or on the tudor roses caught the sunlight and gleamed gladly, as though it rejoiced to see the brightness of the day once more. With trembling hands he took down the portrait of John Knox above the mantel-piece, and hung the arms of New College in its place. * * * * *