David nodded, and together in a rhapsody of silence they walked back past the clangour of Carfax, and, with eyes bemused by the magic of Time, they gazed upon the scalloped gables and gargoyled eaves of Brasenose, and upon the storied front of Oriel, enriched by the sculptor’s art with faint lovely figures of all that is most rememberable in the city’s studious history, of Emperors and Kings and the Builders of Empires. In the long, tenebrous quietude of the Turl they lingered, where, across the empurpled dusk of the narrow street, the lighted windows of rival colleges blinked lazy, kindly eyes at each other. And wandering under the pinnacled soar of Exeter Chapel, past Hertford too, where the winged nudity of cherubim upholds a high-flung Bridge of Sighs, they drew near the elephantine deities of the Indian Institute, and thence in the darkling distance, they could see before them the polychrome of Keble, and beyond, glowing faint and Venetian beneath the decrescent moon and a myriad plangent stars, the patterned diaper of the Parks Museum. “It is too, too beautiful …” whispered Gaveston, and his voice tailed away. And then, in the pause after his words, came back the recollection of his mother: _she_ must know, and at once, of his safe advent and his new-found extremity of happiness. “But where is the Post Office?” he asked, and, turning on their tracks, David led his friend in a silence that was too deep for words to what he sought. Gaveston looked up with delight at its grim Gothic facade as they passed through its portal. What a city! Even the post offices here were beautiful, he reflected, and dim. Without hesitation he demanded a telegraph form, and wrote: _Lady Penhaligon 99 Half Moon Street Mayfair. The Spires are still dreaming Gav._ He handed it to the girl. She glanced askance at the clock. “It’s the last telegram we’re taking to-night,” she said. “And the most beautiful, is it not?” added Gav, while she ticked over the jewelled words with her lamentably workaday pencil. “Twelve,” she murmured with the most engaging of lisps. “That will be a shilling.” “Oh, Half Moon _without_ a hyphen, please,” corrected Gaveston beseechingly. “But that’ll make it one and a penny,” she looked up with surprise. “Quite,” said Gav conclusively, and paid. And as the two friends strolled back towards their college, he explained to David how it had long been a principle with him always to exceed the authorized allowance of words. He was that sort of person. CHAPTER II PLINTH Next evening, steeped in the puce and russet dusk of an Oxford twilight, Gaveston sat meditatively enframed in his mullioned window. It was well-nigh the hour for his first dinner in his college Hall; already, from the insistent belfries of the remoter colleges the fateful seven strokes were shattering with their clangorous curfew the vespertinal peace of the entranced city.