“_Quel hors d’œuvre!_” he exclaimed in involuntary admiration. He was indeed a masterpiece. But what was that? _Tap, tap_.… Yes, a knock … a visitor already--was it possible? Quickly Gaveston tiptoed over to the Chappel concert grand which had been despatched as advance luggage, and in an instant his room was throbbing with the evanescent, moonlit melancholy of the Chopin nocturne in G-flat minor. He chose that (it was his mother’s favourite, too) because it always seemed to fill a room with just that warm sense of welcome and intimacy which a host should emanate. At the first bars of the _scherzo_ the knocking was repeated, a little louder. He stopped short. “Pray enter!” he called, with an effective half-turn on the stool. The door opened. A tall upstanding figure was silhouetted there on the threshold. “Hullo, Gav!” “I don’t think I---- Why, David! David! Of all the surprises!” And Gaveston rose, resplendent with welcome. “I heard you were coming up this term, and I----” “But, David, I’d no idea you were here!” “It’s my second year at Wallace, Gav.” “And I never heard!” This was splendid! Gaveston stepped back to look at his friend with whole-hearted pleasure. David Paunceford was a figure of the true Hellenic mould, athletic in every limb and fibre, flaxen of hair, blue of eye, and aquiline of nose, sane to the finger-tips, and the heir to at least one of England’s oldest peerages. Add to this that he was an intense admirer of Gaveston, and who could better approach the ideal of a friend? David had entered Eton a year before Gaveston ffoulis, but none the less they had thenceforward, for several eventful years, been inseparables. They had been elected to Pop on the same Founder’s Day; they had been bracketed together for the same prizes, had played the Wall Game at the self-same wall, and, through many a long afternoon of drowsy, elm-shadowed cricketing, Agar’s Plough had seen them batting side by side. Nearly all their uproariously happy holidays they had spent together, and Gav, of course, was an instant favourite with all the Paunceford keepers on the Wuthering moors and all the Paunceford gillies on the island of Eigg. They had received (surest sign of popularity) the same nickname, and at the last, one cloudy morning rather before their allotted span of halves, they had left Eton together, for the same reason but in different cabs. “And I’m only a freshman!” laughed Gaveston, closing the piano-lid. “Why, you’ll have to put me up to everything, David. Come on, take me for a walker.” He already knew his ’Varsity slang.…