Which step-father, Gaveston wondered; but a glance at Gotha’s Almanack decided him in a trice against acceptance. “Phew!” he said to David, “what an escape!” and the Baroness’s invitation fell heavily back into the “refusals tray.” But there were others. * * * * * It was a gay spring morning. Term was over, but, sitting though he was in a first-class Great Western smoker, Gaveston could hardly realize the fact. For where was the familiar landscape of Berks and Bucks stretching like a sea between his terms and his vacations, his vacations and his terms? Where was deserted Didcot? Where the reasty biscuitries of Reading? And where were Wormwood Scrubbs with their Cyclopean hangar, and their promise of speedy arrival at familiar Paddington? Oh, of course; he remembered now: he had left Oxford from the Down Platform. And on purpose. The train was the only place (except his bed) where Gaveston was often alone, and cradled by its rhythmical monotone of sound, he always surrendered himself to reflection and revery. With unseeing eyes he gazed upon the expanse of gloomy Drinkwater country which so emphatically was not the usual well-brooked but over-factoried valley of the Thames. How many hours, he thought, one wastes in unmotivated journeyings, in merely purposeless vagulity! How futile the pursuit of action for its own poor sake! For what lay before him at his journey’s end? An English country-house, an English week-end party, with its drinks and its drains, its horses and its carriages, its ghosts and its flirtations, its back-stairs and its back-chat--with no break in its well-bred monotony. He saw it all stretching prospectively and preposterously before him, all of it: the dormant station on an almost impossibly bifurcated branch-line, its wooden platform bright with Easter Lilies and lanky-Lot’s-wife, and marked [Illustration] Stops by Request in Bradshaw; the rustic _gaucherie_ of the solitary and half-wit porter, and then the glimpse of the perky cockade of the expectant groom; and that predestinedly convergent encounter in the wagonette with the other, but not over-numerous, guests, who, though only too well known to each other, had travelled down in separate, but first-class, compartments; and then that excruciatingly culminative moment of arrival beneath the pompous Georgian portico, with the formalized words of welcome slipping upwards into its stucco recesses, that gossipy tea on the terrace, or, if season or weather proved inclement, in the mauve drawing-room, and that chaste and tapestried bedroom in the bachelors’ wing with (yes) the assertively blue hot-water can ready in the, certainly adequate, but somehow not urbanely inviting, basin.