The eager congratulations of the Mongoons still rang gratefully in his ears as he felt his way down the turret staircase of XXXIV. Only five hours ago he had climbed it, an unknown potentiality in Wallace: he descended to find himself a Mongoon and famous. And now, how quiet and dark lay the quad before him! It seemed almost to be expectant, to be waiting for something astounding and prodigious to break in upon its alabaster dream. The dawn? Gaveston wondered as he walked back to his rooms, or … or…? What a night it had been! The manner! And Mongo! Well and truly had the foundation been laid for the quiet unobtrusive success of his first term at Wallace. He held high his head. And then, passing by the groined door of the Old Library, he flung wide his arms to the stars. “Youth!” he cried in the stillness. “Youth! Youth! Youth!” CHAPTER III TOCCATA AND FUGUE And term was really over then! Gaveston could hardly believe it. But yet--it must be: already the 3.43 from Oxford had slid through the pale December sunlight past Hinksey Halt, Goring-and-Streatley, and Slough (for Windsor). He had unfolded the still ink-perfumed pages of his _Daily Telegraph_ only to crumple the paper up in exasperation at the _bourgeois_ complacency of its intolerable _clichés_, and it lay forgotten in a corner of the first-class compartment. No, the frore Chiltern Hills and the willow-shadowed water-meadows had been fitter accompaniment for the rhythm of his musings, playing as they were upon two months dappled with such perplexing patterns of sun-warm happiness and frosty disillusionment.… This had been but his first term. But nevertheless, with Mongo’s help, he had succeeded in getting himself elected to the Union Society without a single blackball; and after that the other clubs, smaller and less exclusive, had hastened to net in this remarkable freshman. Soon no host had felt his party, whether breakfast or cocoa, to be a real social _éclat_ unless one at least of his guests could enliven the discussion, whether it turned upon the beauties of Beowulf or the existence of a Deity, by the apt quotation of Gaveston ffoulis’s opinion on the point at moot. And Gaveston had soon won a name for himself, too, by the quiet and unostentatious entertaining he had done, receiving the nicer sort of undergraduate now in his Wallace _pied-à-terre_, now in the quaint but distinctive Cadena grill-room; and his meals were voted by the _cordons bleus_ of the University to be worthy of the best modern Luculli and Mæcenasses. He had made good. He lit a plump Turkish cigarette, and lay back to ponder both present and future.