Sometimes they journeyed far out to the lush sequestered creeks of Windrush and Evenlode, and, passing a score of poet-laden canoes, would anchor in a dreaming silence to watch the curious swimmings of ephemeral moles and the filigree antics of the booming water-beetles. And there, with the blue dimness of evening folding softly in about them, they would sup off rosy prawns and plump white-hearted cherries in deep meadows all prankt with ragged camphire and callow and pied cantharis, and then, in a calm moon-washed silence beyond the ruffling of words or of laughter, they would float slowly, slowly back beneath the orbing planets that overhung the distant towers of Iffley, trailing their fingers coolly in the dimpling eddies of their wake, their ears untroubled, save by the hoarse unearthly wailing of some night-flying fritillary, or by the occasional clearing of each other’s throats. Once from a tree that darkly reached out over the water came the sudden capitous perfume of syringa, and the night grew unendurably canicular. There was a plop. A discarded cherry-stone had tumbled from the scuppers, and the mirror of the warm tranquil water was shivered by annular ripples broadening sluggishly to either bank. That was all. Nothing stirred. Gaveston was reduced to a state of utter poignancy he had seldom known before. “David,” he whispered across the rowlocks. “I can’t talk.…” And, rising from the cushions, he stripped off his clothes there and then in the fickle quicksilver light of the vagarious moon, and plunged, a new Narcissus, into the star-strewn waters of the melancholy stream. David, of course, did the same, and when Gaveston saw the exquisite nakedness of his friend iridescent against the palpitating hornbeams, he could no longer endure the fugacious mockery of the arch-hamadryad, Time, and together they had wandered uneasily back in the querulous silence of mutual, inexplicable exasperation.… * * * * * Inebriate though he was with this passionate Pantheism, which in its intensity would have put to shame the great Walden himself in his forest home, Gaveston did not altogether forget those social activities which do so much to make Oxford (and probably Cambridge) a training ground for all that is best in English public life. Profoundly as he believed in Nature, he did not discount the urban amenities.[16] [16] These words might well have been inscribed as an epitaph on Mr. Budd’s watery tomb. (LIT. EXEC.) Eights Week came in due course, and Gav was busied with the reception of some offshoots of his family on the Penhaligon side. His mother advised him of their coming in the postscript of a long letter from Mürren, where she was passing the summer. And Gaveston was not slow to close his Tussore collar, don the famous club tie of the Union Society, and engage a suite at the Mitre Inn.