Langham watched her mount the first step or two; his eye travelled up the slim figure so instinct with pride and will--and something in him suddenly gave way. It was like a man who feels his grip relaxing on some attacking thing he has been heading by the throat. He followed her hastily. ‘Must you go in? And none of us have paid our respects yet to those phloxes in the back garden?’ Oh woman--flighty woman! An instant before, the girl, sore and bruised in every fibre, she only half knew why, was thirsting that this man might somehow offer her his neck that she might trample on it. He offers it and the angry instinct wavers, as a man wavers in a wrestling match when his opponent unexpectedly gives ground. She paused, she turned her white throat. His eyes upturned met hers. ‘The phloxes did you say?’ she asked, coolly redescending the steps. ‘Then round here, please.’ She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxation of nerve and will which for the moment had something intoxicating in it. ‘There are your phloxes,’ she said, stopping before a splendid line of plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits rose at a bound. ‘I don’t know why you admire them so much. They have no scent and they are only pretty in the lump’--and she broke off a spike of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, and threw it away. He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it was intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange face. ‘Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more than usual,’ he said. ‘After this morning it will be so long before I see the true country again.’ He looked, smiling, round on the blue and white brilliance of the sky, clear again after a night of rain; on the sloping garden, on the village beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close beside them, with its blooms. on tiptoe for a flight, With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white. ‘Oh! Oxford is countrified enough,’ she said, indifferently, moving down the broad grass-path which divided the garden into two equal portions. ‘But I am leaving Oxford, at any rate for a year,’ he said quietly. ‘I am going to London.’ Her delicate eyebrows went up. ‘To London?’ Then, in a tone of mock meekness and sympathy: ‘How you will dislike it!’ ‘Dislike It-why?’ ‘Oh! Because--’ she hesitated, and then laughed her daring girlish laugh, ‘because there are so many stupid people in London; the clever people are not all picked out like prize apples, as I suppose they are in Oxford.’ ‘At Oxford?’ repeated Langham, with a kind of groan. At Oxford? You imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by clever people?’