One evening I was tidying up Ronald’s room at Cambridge. We were both of us in residence now: I as an M.A., while he had just entered as an undergraduate. He was as studiously untidy as I was the reverse, and, but for me, his room, artistic as it was, would always have looked like a boudoir that had been used over-night for a tap-room. Pipes, tobacco, and matches met the eye everywhere, scattered among vases of flowers and ferns; no two sheets of the _Times_ were together in one place; “Esmond” lay cheek by jowl with “Tom Jones” (the former, I was glad to see, the better worn), while there was more than a suspicion that his surplice was in use as a bed for a litter of kittens. Ronald himself lay at his ease upon the sofa, watching—I cannot say with interest, but at any rate without prejudice—my improvements for the worse. But I roused him at last. In replacing a small box of Italian olive wood I knocked off the lid, and an aggregation of articles unimaginable were scattered on the floor. “Hullo! stop that, old man,” he said. “You’ll be losing or breaking some of my most cherished possessions.” “What on earth are they, Ronald? Here’s a small crucifix and a missal (you haven’t turned Roman Catholic, have you?) and any amount of rings—most of them brass—and, by Jove, a lock of hair! Is the last a love token? It looks uncommonly like the relic of another escapade. Did it belong to the girl who played the harmonium on the beach at Bayview? I didn’t know you’d got so far as that. Besides, her hair was light, if I remember. Out with it, old man, and clear your conscience by confession.” “Have done with your jokes, Fred; you’re the last fellow to chaff like that if you knew the rights of it. And, if I must tell you, I must. But I didn’t want you to know of the matter; it looks too much like boasting. However, you find out everything I do; so I may as well tell you all about this, before you hunt it up for yourself in some underhand way, or make a tale out of it that isn’t the true one. You know Richards, Fred; the man my uncle made me travel with last autumn—to see the world, as he called it. I never liked the fellow, and always thought him a cad; but I didn’t know till then that he was a coward as well as a cad.” “I always thought him both,” was my reply.