In this Oxford where the black gown has been laid aside and young men hurry to and fro in the dress of the battle-field--in this Oxford no man walked at times more heavily, feeling the grief that cannot be made articulate, than did the Warden of King's College as he went about his work, a lonely man, without wife or child and with poignant memories of the very blossom of young manhood plucked from his hand and gone for ever. And of the men who passed under his college gates and through the ivy-clad quadrangles, most were strangers--coming and going--learning the arts of war--busy under orders, and the few, a poor remnant of academic youth--foreigners or weaklings. And he, the Warden himself, felt himself almost a stranger--for into his life had surged new thoughts, anxious fears and ambitious hopes--for England, the England of the years to come--an England rising up from her desolation and her mourning and striving to become greater, more splendid and more spiritual than she had been before. It was a late October afternoon in 1916 and the last rays of autumn sunshine fell through the drawing-room windows of the Warden's lodgings. These rays of sunshine lit up a notable portrait over the stone fireplace. The portrait was of a Warden of the eighteenth century; a fine fleshy face it was, full of the splendid noisy paganism of his time. You can stand where you will in the room, but you cannot escape the sardonic stare that comes from his relentless, wide-open, luminous eyes. He seems as if he challenged you to stop and listen to the secret of his double life--the life of a scholar and divine of easy morals. Words seemed actually upon his lips, thoughts glowing in his eyes--and yet--there is silence. There was only one person in the room, a tall vigorous woman, still handsome in spite of middle age, and she was looking up at the portrait with her hands clasped behind her back. She was not thinking of the portrait--her thoughts were too intent on something else. Her thoughts indeed had nothing to do with the past--they were about the future, the future of the new Warden, Dr. Middleton, the future of this only brother of hers whom she loved more than anyone in the world--except her own husband; a brother more than ten years younger than herself, to whom she had been a mother till she married and who remained in her eyes a sort of son, all the more precious to her because children had been denied her. She had come at her brother's call to arrange his new home for him. She had arranged everything with sober economy, because Oxford was mourning. She had retained all that she found endurable of the late Warden's. And now she turned round and looked on her handiwork.