With hooves gaily a-clatter over cobbles and causeway, the hansom wended its romantic way through the mazy purlieus which lead the traveller into the heart of this city that men call Oxford and the gods call Youth. Gaveston longed for a cockle-shell in his hat, to symbolize this mystic, dreamed-of wayfaring, and when at long last his driver reined in before a Gothic gateway darkly overhung by a stalwart, sky-crowned tower, he knew that his sense of the fitting had in all sooth been justified. He threw the fare to the jarvey, and crossed the threshold of his historic college, nodding kindly to the bewhiskered porter’s obsequious welcome. “I must keep this up,” he murmured pensively in the vaulted porch. He was now a Wallace man.… * * * * * Later that evening Gaveston gazed hungrily out over the Wallace quadrangle from the mullioned windows of the rooms allotted to him. “Staircase XVII … staircase XVII,” he kept repeating. What a place it was! Never had his utmost dreams envisaged this romantic reckoning by stairways. And this was Wallace at last! His eyes wandered over the beautiful accidents of its profile, clear-cut against the autumnal sky’s violaceous and crepuscular glory. With its myriad pointed turrets and ogive windows and frowning battlements, the college recalled to Gaveston ffoulis’s memory those vast baronial strongholds of Scotland and Touraine which he dimly remembered from the interminable travels of his picaresque infancy.… “Dear Mums!” he whispered to the listening tree-tops, and a far-away look bedimmed his eyes. For with the memory of those other days came back the ever-fascinating, ever-elusive image of his mother, that dear whisp of frail, ethereal beauty who throughout his waking hours was scarcely ever absent from the gentle background of his thoughts. And, remembering her, he let Time slip silently by with fleet, inaudible steps until---- Why! it was nearly eight o’clock! Too late now to dine in Hall--but what matter? He turned to open the generous hamper which, only that morning, his mother had chosen for him at Fortnum’s. (How far-off already seemed the glittering _clinquetis_ of Piccadilly!) And there, in the quietude of his own room, Gaveston dined simply off a dish of cold Bombay duck, garnished (a _bon viveur_, he preferred delicacies that were out of season) with some superb bottled peas. Rising from his second _meringue_, Gaveston decided to resume his reverie, and walked over to the large cheval-glass that occupied an inglenook formed by a turret--he had ordered the awestruck scout to take it from its packing-case before any of his sixteen suit-cases were unlocked. He looked at himself with some satisfaction. Was it so, he wondered, that Oxford would see him--a svelte, willowy figure, with fair hair and fair skin and fair eyes, whose every trait bore the subtle handwriting of race and breeding, and on whose lips played the most infectious of enigmatic smiles.