Betty, of course, showed the utmost interest in the prospects of the Third Trinity crew. She was delighted when she heard that they were to row behind the boat which was to be steered by Mr. Binney, for she still maintained a deep-rooted prejudice against her future father-in-law, in spite of the welcome he had given her as Lucius's intended bride. "If they bump them, and I see it," she said to one of her friends, the girl from whom she had won the box of chocolate creams, "I think I shall scream with joy. Oh, won't cousin Peter's face be worth seeing when he has to hold up his hand and acknowledge he has been beaten. I'd give worlds to see it." "You show a very vindictive spirit," said her friend. Mr. Binney's time was fully occupied between putting the finishing touches to his reading, and his work on the river. He had almost entirely dropped out of the social side of University life. Although his wings had been clipped, and he would now have been a quite harmless companion, the men with whom he might have associated, had he behaved differently when he first came up, still looked rather shyly on him; and he had entirely dropped the society of men like Howden, for he had learnt such a lesson that he would have been almost frightened of results if one of them had even come into his rooms. Indeed, the poor little man led a very dull life, and when he had time to think about it, on Sundays perhaps, or for half-an-hour after his work was done, and before he went to bed, he often asked himself what was the use of his staying up at Cambridge at all, since so much of what he had hoped to gain from the place seemed to have been an illusive dream. He had lost his Martha, at any rate for the present, and in his moments of insight he could not disguise from himself the fact that he was unpopular, although he endeavoured to carry off the conviction with an added bumptiousness of manner which did not endear him to those with whom he came in contact. He would probably have made up his mind to leave Cambridge after this term, when he would have passed one examination and attained to a considerable measure of success on the river, but one consideration deterred him. He hoped to be chosen to steer the University boat in the following spring, and on the chance of having that ambition realised he would have stayed on at Cambridge if everyone in the place had cut him.