Mr. Binney arrived, accompanied by Minshull, for whom he had taken rooms at the Hoop, in order that he might have the advantage of his able tuition up to the very last moment, for he was determined to throw away no little chance that might add to his prospect of success. Mr. Binney himself had been allotted rooms in college for the few days during which the examination lasted. If he was not already a Cambridge man this was the next best thing to it, and a proud man was Mr. Binney to find himself the occupant of a garret in the Great Court with a bedroom which any one of his servants at Russell Square would have turned up her nose at. They were the rooms of a sizar, and were barely furnished even for a very poor man's rooms, but the sizar had blossomed into the Senior Wrangler of that year, and that fact repaid Mr. Binney in full for any little inconvenience he might have felt at being deprived of most of the necessities and all the luxuries of life to which he had been accustomed. Lucius accompanied his father to these rooms and left him to himself, for he was lunching with the captain of his boat. It was the last night of the races, and Mr. Binney proposed, after spending a busy afternoon with Minshull over his books, to go down to Ditton Corner and see the boats. Lucius thanked his lucky stars that he was rowing and need not present his father to an admiring circle of friends on that very public occasion. He would have been pleased enough to introduce him as a father, there or at any other place, if he had come up simply to pay him a visit, for Lucius was a right-minded boy and showed no disposition to be ashamed of his somewhat humble origin among his circle of more or less gilded youth; but to have to say "My father, who is coming up here next term," and to have to stand by while little Mr. Binney tried to reduce himself to the level of an inexperienced schoolboy, as he felt certain he would do, was an ordeal that he did not feel equal to, and he made up his mind to let the inevitable catastrophe bring itself about in its own way. He told himself that he was happy to have averted it for so long, for although some of the dons knew of Mr. Binney's intention, and his own Tutor had actually talked to him about it, the secret did not seem to have become public property among the undergraduates of the college.