The summer passed. Frank had been to the Henley Regatta at Crawford’s invitation, and had stayed with him at the old “Red Lion” with various crews; had run down the bank at his side when he was practising for the Diamond Sculls in the sweet June mornings, and had shouted with the shouting crowd when he won the race, beating the London man and the Cantab who had been training “dark.” Then he had gone to Crawford’s home for a pleasant week; then back to little Porchester, where, with garden-parties and cricket, with boating on the river that seemed so deserted after the crowded Isis, and lawn-tennis, the time had passed away happily enough. Of work for the “Schools” Frank had done little or nought; but when in August the vicar’s daughter left Porchester for six weeks, work somehow seemed easier, and he managed to get through a fair amount; and again, when the boys went back to school about the middle of September, and he was left alone with his parents and sisters, there seemed fresh opportunities for study. But then--but then back came the vicar’s daughter, and books were again forgotten. The village seemed to have gained fresh beauties. Every old gate and stile seemed no longer made of common wood, every hedge no longer clad with common green. The organ-loft where she practised in the week was no longer a dusty, dark, break-neck place, but the place for breaking something which, whatever lovers may say, is often easily mended by “Time and the change the old man brings.” And what a poet Frank was in those days! How he idealized, and in his own fashion glorified, every little winding woodland path, every glimpse of wold seen through the fading autumn leaves, every stretch of quiet river, the old boats, the crumbling bridge, the dark weir, the church-tower--that useful part of a young poet’s stock-in-trade. In fact, when he returned to Oxford one Friday evening in October, he quite agreed with the old woman’s and the sailor’s superstition that Friday was an unlucky day; he wrapped himself in his rug, and felt that if his heart was not breaking, he was at least deeply in love. Silence was his consolation. He rejected the invitation of a friend whom he met _en route_ to transfer himself and his goods to the atmosphere of a smoking compartment. He stared gloomily at the persistent bookstall-boys; rejected even the offer of a Banbury cake at Didcot. In his condition, there was something positively comforting in that most cheerless and wretched of all stations. The wind that moaned in the telegraph-wires seemed to murmur “Rose.” The bell that rang violently in the platform-porter’s hand seemed like the little single bell in Porchester Church--of course much louder and harsher to Frank’s imagination, but it was a bell, and it recalled Rose, and that was enough.