Again the absurd idea emerged in Falloden's consciousness; and this time it seemed to find its own expression, and to be merely making use of his voice, which he heard as though it were some one else's.

He bent over towards Radowitz.

"Would you care to share the cottage with me?" he said abruptly. "I want to find a place to read in--out of Oxford."

Radowitz looked up, amazed--speechless! Falloden's eyes met Otto's steadily. The boy turned away. Suddenly he covered his face with his free hand.

"Why did you hate me so?" he said, breathing quickly. "What had I done to you?"

"I didn't hate you," said Falloden thickly. "I was mad."

"Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a bra.s.s farthing for me--except as she, does now. She would like to nurse me--and give me back my music. But she can't--and you can't."

There was silence again. Otto's chest heaved. As far as he could with his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And at last he shook off emotion--with a laugh in which there was no mirth.

"Well, at least, I shouldn't make such a row now as I used to do--practising."

Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, by which the "bloods," in their first attack upon him, had tried to silence his piano.

"Can't you play at all?" he said at last, choosing the easiest of several remarks that presented themselves.

"I get about somehow on the keys. It's better than nothing. And I'm writing something for my degree. It's rather good. If I could only keep well!" said the boy impatiently. "It's this d.a.m.ned health that gets in the way."

Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.

"Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they're now talking about--could you stand that?"

"I would have a room where I didn't hear it. That would be all right."

"There's a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago," said Otto excitedly--"a marvellous electric invention a man's at work on, where you only turn a handle, or press a b.u.t.ton, and you get Rubinstein--or Madame Schumann or my country-man, Paderewski, who's going to beat everybody. It isn't finished yet. But it won't be for the likes of me. It'll cost at least a thousand pounds."

"They'll get cheaper," said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows on knees, and eyes fixed on his companion. It seemed to him he was talking in a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparently was going to come to pa.s.s. At any rate Radowitz had not refused. He sat with the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding its long ears. He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and when he saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy, hesitating step, he sprang up eagerly to greet her. But there was another figure behind her. It was Sorell; and at sight of him "something sealed" the boy's lips. He looked round at Falloden, and dropped back into his chair.

Falloden rose from his seat abruptly. A formal and scarcely perceptible greeting pa.s.sed between him and Sorell. All Falloden's irritable self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cyprian tutor. He was not going to stay and cry _peccavi_ any more in the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden and Connie Bledlow's company.

"Thank you--I must go," he said brusquely, as Connie tried to detain him. "There is so much to do nowadays. I shall be leaving Flood next week. The agent will be in charge."

"Leaving--for good?" she asked, in her appealing voice, as they stood apart.

"Probably--for good."

"I don't know how to say--how sorry I am!"

"Thank you. But I am glad it's over. When you get back to Oxford--I shall venture to come and call."

"That's a promise," she said, smiling at him. "Where will you be?"

"Ask Otto Radowitz! Good-bye!"

Her start of surprise pleased him. He approached Radowitz. "Shall I hear from you?" he said stiffly.

"Certainly!" The boy looked up. "I will write to-morrow."

The garden door had no sooner closed on Falloden than Radowitz threw himself back, and went into a fit of laughter, curious, hollow laughter.

Sorell looked at him anxiously.

"What's the meaning of that, Otto?"

"You'll laugh, when you hear! Falloden and I are going to set up house together, in the cottage on Boar's Hill. He's going to read--and I'm to be allowed a piano, and a piano-player. Queer, isn't it?"

"My dear Otto!" cried Sorell, in dismay. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Well, he offered it--said he'd come and look after me. I don't know what possessed him--nor me either. I didn't exactly accept, but I shall accept. Why shouldn't I?"

"Because Falloden's the last person in the world to look after anybody--least of all, you!" said Sorell with indignant energy. "But of course it's a joke! You mean it for a joke. If he proposed it, it was like his audacity. n.o.body would, who had a shred of delicacy. I suppose he wants to disarm public opinion!"

Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell from under his finely marked eyebrows.

"I don't believe he cares a hang for public opinion," he said slowly.

"Nor do I. If you could come, of course that would settle it. And if you won't come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings, that settles it too. But you will come, old man--you will come!"

And he nodded, smiling, at hid quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticed Connie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breath fluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused, she bent forward, and laid her hand on Sorell's arm:

"Let him!" she said pleadingly--"let him do it!"

Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. "Let Douglas Falloden make some amends to his victim; if he can, and will. Don't be so unkind as to prevent it!" That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him the mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe that there is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches her.

Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him dream of consenting to such a house-mate through this winter which might be his last!

Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such a task? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hoped he might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should ease his remorse at Otto's expense, by offering what he could never fulfil, and by taking the place of some one on whom Otto could have really leaned--that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man's egotism, his epicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him uncomfortable or unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words as well as he could. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance. And Sorell presently felt that there was a secret bond between them.

Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came for Radowitz, who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance were left alone.

Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother's soul showed through the girl's slighter temperament. The old satiric aloofness in Connie's brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her mother's, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella Risborough's sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough's bright sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What can a man friend do for a young girl in the fermenting years of her youth! And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt himself powerless--in all the greater matters--and was inclined to think that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together--parts both of the "Iliad"

and the "Odyssey"; and through "that ageless mouth of all the world,"

what splendid things had spoken to her!--Hector's courage, and Andromache's tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity of Achilles, mother love and wife love, death and the scorn of death. He had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for himself he had found her the dearest and most responsive of pupils.

But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Scroll's type--disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden's type--strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined--is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of the other.

Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation--if it was a reconciliation. She wanted no doubt to heal Falloden's conscience, and so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in the process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.

Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips; and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed.

But when he was gone, she walked up and down the lawn under the evening sky, her hands behind her--pa.s.sionately dreaming.