"I can say what I feel to you, Hardy. I always have been able, and it's such a comfort to me now. It was you who put these sort of thoughts into my head, too, so you ought to sympathize with me." "I do, my dear fellow. But you'll be all right again in a few days." "Don't you believe it. It isn't only what you seem to think, Hardy. You don't know me so well as I do you, after all. No, I'm not just love-sick, and hipped because I can't go and see her. That has something to do with it, I dare say, but it's the sort of shut-up selfish life we lead here that I can't stand. A man isn't meant to live only with fellows like himself, with good allowances paid quarterly, and no care but how to amuse themselves. One is old enough for something better than that, I'm sure." "No doubt," said Hardy with provoking taciturnity. "And the moment one tries to break through it, one only gets into trouble." "Yes, there's a good deal of danger of that, certainly," said Hardy. "Don't you often long to be in contact with some of the realities of life, with men and women who haven't their bread and butter already cut for them? How can a place be a university where no one can come up who hasn't two hundred a year or so to live on?" "You ought to have been at Oxford four hundred years ago, when there were more thousands here than we have hundreds." "I don't see that. It must have been ten times as bad then." "Not at all. But it must have been a very different state of things from ours; they must have been almost all poor scholars, who worked for their living, or lived on next to nothing." "How do you really suppose they lived, though?" "Oh, I don't know. But how should you like it now, if we had fifty poor scholars at St. Ambrose, besides us servitors--say ten tailors, ten shoemakers, and so on, who came up from love of learning, and attended all the lectures with us, and worked for the present undergraduates while they were hunting, and cricketing, and boating?" "Well, I think it would be a very good thing--at any rate, we should save in tailors' bills." "Even if we didn't get our coats so well built," said Hardy, laughing. "Well, Brown, you have a most catholic taste, and 'a capacity for talking in new truths', all the elements of a good Radical in you." "I tell you, I hate Radicals," said Tom indignantly. "Well, here we are in the town. I'll go round by 'The Choughs' and catch you up before you get to High Street." Tom, left, to himself, walked slowly on for a little way, and then quickly back again in an impatient, restless manner, and was within a few yards of the corner where they had parted, when Hardy appeared again. He saw at a glance that something had happened. "What is it--she is not ill?" he said quickly. "No; quite well, her aunt says." "You didn't see her then?" "No. The fact is she has gone home." CHAPTER XXIII--THE ENGLEBOURN CONSTABLE