A man who had always been on the best of terms with an adoring family and a wealthy father, he ambled easily through life, enjoying everything, and being especially happy when he was worked up into an emotion by a poem or sunset. Generally tethered in the shallows of everyday circumstances, his mind experienced undimmed delight in acute sensation. He had one great motif running like a silver thread through his consciousness--his love for Gobion; and every night he humbly and earnestly prayed for him, kneeling at a little _prie-Dieu_ painted green. To him there had been something very sacred in his relations with this man. One night Gobion had stayed behind after a wine party, and had sat late, staring into the fire and talking simply and hopefully about the trials and temptations of a young man's life. Very frankly he had talked with a nobleness of ideal and breadth of thought that fascinated Scott and made him feel drawn close to this strange handsome boy who was so assured and so hopeful. After that first night there had been others when they sat alone, and Gobion talked airily with a fantastic wealth of fancy and sweetness of expression. Scott thought he could see in all this man's conversation a high purpose and a stainless purity, made the more obvious by attempts at concealment. Then again, Gobion gave him the impression of being delightfully unworldly, with no idea of the value of money, for he would come to him unconcernedly and borrow ten pounds to get out of some scrape, with a careless freedom that seemed to point to an absolute childishness in money matters. Scott always lent it, and gloried in the feeling that he was helping the friend of his soul, albeit that Gobion had had most of his available cash, and he knew his affairs were getting something precarious. On the morning of the Wadham debate he lay in bed half dozing, with a pleasing sense of anticipation. Gobion was coming to a _tête-à-tête_ breakfast, and he wondered what he would talk about, whether he would wear what he called his "explicit" tie or that green suit which became him so well. Not far away in Exeter, the object of his thoughts was getting up and carefully dressing. He was thinking over the part he would have to play at breakfast, and devising some way of breaking the news of his approaching flight, and thinking out a plan for getting as much money as he could to take him up to town. He had finished his toilette, and was passing out of his bedroom when he noticed that he looked in capital health, and not at all anxious or unhappy enough for a ruined man. Scott would doubtless never have noticed, but Gobion was nothing if not an artist, and had a hatred of incompleteness. Accordingly, he pulled a box of water-colour paints out of a drawer in his writing table, and carefully pencilled two dark sepia lines under his eyes, several times sponging them off till he had got what he considered a proper effect.