He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive by the side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine that ought to be working in the scrum.” Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s Griffin.” CHAPTER III CARNIVAL I CHRISTMAS came: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland. A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . . Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends had been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex. There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.