He faced his books. For a quarter of an hour he saw before him the hanging, baggy cheeks, the white, staring eyes, the glittering ring on the weak finger. His hands began to tremble. . . . There was a timid knock on the door, and he was instantly sure that the body had been found, and that they had come to arrest him. He stood back from the door with his hand pressing on the table. It was almost a relief to him that the summons had come so soon--it would presently all be over. "Come in," he said, and gave one look at the golden mist, at the stars, at the tender face of Aegidius. The door was opened slowly with fumbling hands, and there stood there a large, fat, clumsy, shapeless creature, with a white face, a hooked nose, an open, foolish mouth. The reaction was hysterical. To expect a summons to death and public shame, to find--Bunning. Bunning--that soft, blithering, emotional, religious, middle-class maniac--Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most entertainment. The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come up to Saul's with an intense, burning desire to make a mark. He was stupid, useless at games, having only somewhere behind his fat ugly body a longing to be connected with some cause, some movement, some person of whom he might make a hero. He had, of course, within the first fortnight of his arrival, plunged himself into dire disgrace. He had asked Lawrence, coming like a young god from Marlborough, in to coffee; they had made him drunk and laughed at his hysterical tears: in his desire for popularity he had held a gathering in his room, with the original intention of coffee, cakes and gentle conversation; the evening had ended with the arrival of all his furniture and personal effects upon the grass of the court below his windows. He had been despised by the Dons, buffeted and derided by his fellow undergraduates. Especially had Carfax and Cardillac made his life a burden to him, and whenever it seemed that there was nothing especial to do, the cry arose, "Let's go and rag Bunning," and five minutes later that fat body would tremble at the sound of many men climbing the wooden stairs, at the loud banging on his wooden door, at the cry, "Hullo, Bunning--we've come for some coffee."