'Nice scandal you've been making in the college!' observed Miss Stubbs cheerfully, as she handed Lucy the teacup. She had only brought a teacup; she considered saucers superfluous, unless one happened to be a kitten. 'Scandal!' said Lucy, aghast. 'What scandal have I been making?' 'Oh! it was rumoured you had eloped with a Selwyn man. Somebody saw you going off.' 'With a Selwyn man!' said Lucy with fine scorn. 'As if I should elope with a Selwyn man! If it had been St. Benedict's it would have been different.' 'Or Hall?' suggested Miss Stubbs, who was rumoured to have a cousin at Trinity Hall, or to know a girl who had. 'Ye--es; even Hall would have been better. Who set the ball rolling--Newnham Assurance?' Lucy was much too angry with Pamela to call her by her name. 'No, it wasn't Assurance. She took the other side. She said if you were going to run away with--with a man, you would have had the self-respect to stop and put your gloves on first.' CHAPTER XIV. WYATT EDGELL. Late on the evening of the day when Lucy was supposed by the students of Newnham to have eloped, the man she was said to have eloped with sat working in his college-room. It was not a Selwyn man. The crest on the pocket of the blazer he was wearing was the crest of St. Benedict's. It was nearly the eve of the Mathematical Tripos; there were only a few days more, and, having lost all the early part of the term, Wyatt Edgell was sitting down now at the last minute to recover by a tremendous effort the ground he had lost. He had always been sure of a first; he had never yet taken a second class in any examination at school or college, and his name had generally stood first in the lists. The authorities of St. Benedict's had predicted that it would stand first now in the coming Tripos. There would have been no doubt about it but for that ugly 'accident'--he called it an 'accident'--in the beginning of the term. He had not been himself since he came up this May term. He had been moody and taciturn, and subject to fits of depression. He had given up his wine-parties, and his club suppers and breakfasts, and he had shut himself up in his rooms and sported his oak. Everybody, Tutors and all, said he was working hard, and they 'let him alone'; but his bed-maker knew better! Bed-makers know so much more about a man than anyone else. She fetched Gwatkin to him one morning, when she had come in and found him lying on the floor in a fit of delirium tremens. They kept the matter quiet between them and put him to bed, and the bed-maker gave out to all the men on her staircase that 'he was a-readin' hisself to death.'