"Oh, yes! we were there," returned Nan, innocently, who loved to talk of those dear old times; "and we were at the _fete_ at Oriel, and at the concert at Magdalen also. Ah! do you remember, Dulce?" And then she faltered a little, and flushed,--not because Mr. Drummond was looking at her so intently but at certain thoughts that began to intrude themselves, which entwined themselves with the moonlighted cloisters. "I was to have been there too, only at the last moment I was prevented," replied Archie; but his tone was inexplicable to the girl, it was at once so regretful and awe-struck. Good heavens! if he had met them, and been introduced to them in proper form! They had mentioned a Mr. Hamilton: well, Hamilton had been a pupil of his; he had coached him during a term. "You know Hamilton?" he had said, staring at her; and then he wondered what Hamilton would say if he came down to stay with him next vacation. These reflections made him rather absent; and even when he took his leave, which was not until the falling dews and the glimmer of a late dusk drove Mrs. Challoner into the house, these thoughts still pursued him. Nothing else seemed to have taken so strong a hold on him as this. "Good heavens!" he kept repeating to himself, "to think that the merest chance--just the incidental business of a friend--prevented me from occupying my old rooms during Commemoration! to think I might have met them in company with Hamilton and the other fellows!" The sudden sense of disappointment, of something lost and irremediable in his life, of wasted opportunities, of denied pleasure, came over the young man's mind. He could not have danced with Nan at the University ball, it is true: clergymen, according to his creed, must not dance. But there was the _fete_ at Oriel, and the Magdalen concert, and the Long Walk in the Christchurch meadows, and doubtless other opportunities. He never asked himself if these girls would have interested him so much if he had met them first in ordinary society: from the very first moment they had attracted him strangely. Had he only known them a fortnight? Good heavens! it seemed months, years, a lifetime! These revolutions of mind are not to be measured by time. It had come to this that the late fellow of Oriel, so aristocratic in his tastes, so temperate in his likings, had entered certain devious paths, where hidden pitfalls and thorny enclosures warn the unwary traveller of unknown dangers, and in which he was walking, not blindfold, but by strongest will and intent, led by impulse like a mere boy, and not daring to raise his eyes to the future. "And what Grace would have said!" And for the first time in his life Archie felt that in this case he could not ask Grace's advice. He was loath to turn in at his own gate; but Mattie was standing there watching for him. She ran out into the road to meet him, and then he could see there were letters in her hand.