The Wadham debate was over about eleven, and soon after the hour had struck, Yardly Gobion left the college and strolled down the Broad in the moonlight. He had, as usual, made a sensation. They had been discussing a social question, and though what knowledge of the matter he had came as much from intuition as experience, he spoke well and brilliantly, and now lit his cigarette with a pleasing sense of strength and nerve running through him. The sunshine of applause seemed to warm his impressionable brain, to make it expand with the power of receiving and mentally recording more vivid impressions. He had a pleasing consciousness of being very young and very interesting. He was wonderfully quick and sympathetic in his perceptions, and he could see that every one of the good-natured men at the debate was thinking what a clever fellow he was. He felt instinctively how all his carefully-studied tricks of manner and personal eccentricities told. The big football-playing, warm-hearted undergraduates admired him for his soft felt hat, his terra-cotta tie, his way of arranging his hands when he sat down, and his epigrams. They imagined that all these things were the outcroppings of a distinctive personality, and indeed these little poses would have deceived, and very often did, far cleverer persons than they were. To-night he had said in his speech of a certain genial and popular social reformer that he was a "doctrinaire with a touch of Corney Grain grafted on to a polemic attitude," and already in the Common Room they were chuckling over what they thought was a happy piece of impromptu caricature. Gobion sauntered down the Broad and Turl to the college gates, and when he knocked in found several letters waiting for him in the lodge. He took them up to his rooms, turned on the light (they have electric light at Exeter), and arranged them in a row on the table. Then he turned and looked at himself in the glass. His hand shook till he had had some brandy, and he was several minutes moving restlessly about the room, putting on a blazer, and placing some stray books back on the shelves, before he sat down to read the first letter. He toyed about with it for some minutes, afraid to open it. Outside in the quad a wine party were shouting and singing, their voices echoing strangely in the still winter night, their drunken shouts seeming to be mellowed and made musical by the ancient buildings. At last, with a quick nervous look round the room, he tore open the envelope and began to read. Without any heading the letter began:-- "BASSINGTON VICARAGE, "_Sunday Night._ "I have heard from Dr. Fletcher that you are suspected to be carrying on an intrigue with a low woman in Oxford; that you have not passed a single examination, and that you consistently fritter away your time in speaking at debating societies, and are in the habit of being frequently intoxicated.