Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two, or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes from blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year. Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress. He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class, and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no severance. He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself. Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life, it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an overwrought brain.