So the play proceeded with vigour till Clytemnestra went off with Ægisthus, and shortly after in a hansom with Mr. Sykes. The cold drizzle of the morning had turned to snow, and the melting snow in the streets looked like thin coffee ice. The Babe was playing in a college match that afternoon, and the prospect filled him with a mild despair. XII.--A COLLEGE SUNDAY. “This gloomy tone,” he said, “is far too rife; I’ll demonstrate the loveliness of life.”--HOTCH-POTCH VERSES. Reggie and Ealing had moved into a set of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings, which they shared together. The set consisted of three rooms, two inner and smaller ones, and one large room looking out on to the front court of King’s. The two smaller rooms they used as bedrooms, but as they each had folding Eton beds, by half-past nine or so every morning, provided that they got up in reasonable time, they were converted for the day into sitting-rooms. The outer room was furnished more with regard to what furniture they had, than what furniture it required. Thus there were two pianos, tuned about a quarter of a tone apart from each other, two grandfather’s clocks, and a most deficient supply of chairs. “However,” as Reggie said, “one can always sit on the piano.” Ealing’s powers of execution on the piano were limited. He could play hymn-tunes, or other compositions, where the next chord to the one he was engaged on followed as a corollary from it, and anything in the world which went so slowly as to enable him to glance from the music to his hands between each chord, however complicated it was, provided it did not contain a double sharp, which he always played wrong. He could also, by dint of long practice, play “Father O’Flynn” and the first verse of “Off to Philadelphia in the Morning”; and there seemed to be no reason why, with industry, he should not be able to acquire the power of playing the other verses, in which he considered the chords to be most irregular and unexpected, deserting the air at the most crucial points. Reggie, however, was far more accomplished. He had got past hymn-tunes. The Intermezzo in _Cavaleria Rusticana_--even the palpitating part--was from force of repetition mere child’s play to him, and he aspired to the slow movements out of Beethoven’s Sonatas.