"Oh not at all. I'm delighted. Look here, are you engaged to-morrow? Come to luncheon, will you? You row, don't you? so you'll want to leave early. I won't invite anybody else, and we can discuss them then. Good-night." The big man, with the heavy eyebrows, slightly bowed shoulders and kindly eyes, smiled, nodded, and passed on. Manning followed him up to Paul. "What did he say?" he asked. Paul hardly liked to tell him. It seemed fantastic as he said it. Manning nodded. "I thought as much," he said, smiling. "Remember me, Kestern, when you're a big man. I at any rate put one of your feet on the ladder." Paul mumbled something, and soon escaped. His fire was out in his room, but it mattered little; he could not sit down to read or think quietly after all this. Up and down he paced, repeating Tressor's words: "In its own way, it's a perfect poem." A perfect poem! And Tressor had said it! Said it after those songs, those speeches; said it in that company. Then, as the boy passed and repassed, his eye fell on his text. He looked at it critically: the frame and flowers and lettering were so extraordinarily bad. A few weeks ago he had not remarked that. Still, it was the words that mattered. What would the Master have thought of the college feast? Cana of Galilee? Yes, but He would have been but a visitor. Could He have had a real part in it? Paul swung into a new train of thought. He considered the cost of it all. Why, when he had refused the first cigar, Judson had said _he_ never refused a half-crown smoke. Half a crown for a cigar!--the thing was monstrous to evangelical Paul. The smokes of the dinner alone would have kept a catechist in India for a year! Probably the wines would have paid the annual salary of a white missionary in China. And with every tick of the clock, a heathen soul passed into eternity. How often he had said it! What, then, was he doing among such things? What part had he in such extravagance? "One is your Master, even Christ." Paul sighed, and reached for his diary. "The feast was wonderful (he wrote), extraordinarily beautiful I thought.... But..." Then he went to bed. Wonder on wonders. The morning's post brought him a letter from the editor of _The Granta_, accepting, magnanimously, a short story of an imaginative nature that he had placed in Egypt with the aid of a Baedeker. The editor asked, interestedly, if he had been there. He supposed that Paul must have been, for the descriptions were so vivid. Paul's porridge grew cold. He sat on with the letter in his hand. Donaldson found him so, calling to go with him to a distant lecture. "Hullo," he said, "not finished brekker? You're late again, four!" "I say," said Paul, "_The Granta_'s taken that yarn of mine about Egypt." "By Jove, that's topping." Donaldson spoke enviously, staring at him. "But I told you it was jolly good, didn't I?"