there.

He had pinned up on the old panelling of his wall a photograph of this Parnassus College: a rather gaunt frame building, standing in a ploughed field among a few new-planted trees. About the steps were grouped a number of young men and women, many of them wearing spectacles, and all with earnest faces and provincial dress. "That's my class," Sutton explained, pointing at his own figure in the group. "It's the biggest class we've had so far, thirteen gentlemen and seven ladies."

Foley studied the photograph of the college, and the pictures on the mantelpiece—several college friends, with lank serious faces; an intellectual young lady, her hand resting on a copy of the Bible; and an old, mild, white bearded minister—Dr. Turnpenny, no doubt. There was a picture too of a wide city street. Then it really existed, this remote place, and people lived there! he thought, amused at the curious chance which had brought Sutton, the promise and pride, perhaps, of his native town, and set him down in so different a world.

But at last Foley turned from the yellow lamplight, the photographs, and the voice of the American sawing in his ear. Going to the window he opened the lattice and leaned out into the night. Cool, fresh, and dark was the air that breathed on his face, while before him, blue and vague under the white moon, there grew on his sight the towers, the dome-like trees, and shining roofs of Oxford; dim, romantic, and steeped in silence, save for the even tinkle of a distant bell. With sudden unaffected sentiment, he felt how much he cared for Oxford and all that Oxford stood for.

"Do come here," he called out with a friendly impulse, turning his head into the yellow light of the room, "I don't think I ever saw such a view."

The American came and leaned beside him at the open window. "Yes, it is nice," he said at length, and Foley was surprised by a fugitive sound of real feeling and appreciation in his voice.

III.

Gradually he came to take a more real interest in his neighbour. The books that Sutton read, Sutton's love of poetry—surprised him; little things he would say now and then seemed to show indications of sensitive fancies and shy feelings hardly in accordance with his dry exterior. What a thing it would be for him, Foley thought, if the poor young man's taste could be really cultivated; if he could only be set free from his narrowing ideas and made to look at life for himself, instead of seeing it always through the grey fog of Puritan prejudice!

Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him, and seemed to puzzle him—he would come days afterwards with carefully thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read, as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a want of beauty in the service.

And it was only once that Foley felt even for a moment the least uncomfortable about the things he said to his friend—one evening when he happened to run upstairs with some specious argument about the Apostolic Succession, (for when an idea occurred to him he liked to make use of it at once,) and going into the American's room, he found him on his knees in prayer.

In that old place—for St. Mary's was not one of the more liberal Colleges, but a sleepy, ancient, aristocratic society, very conservative of its own beliefs and manners and prejudices—Eliaphet Sutton lived on at first, unknown to almost everybody, and only noticed for the oddness of his looks, as he went in and out to his lectures or solitary walks. But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint unconventionalities of his speech and ways.

A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of life; concerned, many of them, only with its theoretic problems, interested more, perhaps, in the ancient Greeks than in contemporary affairs—and, indeed, not unlike the Greeks in their care for the clearness and beauty of the mind, the athletic strength of the body—surely, Foley thought, the young Methodist could not have found so delightful a place in all the world beside.

How much he was really influenced by it Foley could not tell; certainly as the months went by he seemed to be more aware of the beauty of Oxford; he would stop sometimes of his own accord to look through a blue gateway or down a sunlit street, and once Foley saw him standing, a quaint figure, under the University Church, and gazing up at the spire—at the religious statues there, which seemed to be voyaging through the windy sky and among its great white clouds. He started to join him, but Sutton, seeing he was noticed, moved hastily away.

Then Foley remembered an evening when, coming out into the quadrangle, he saw a figure he recognized as Sutton's standing at a barred gate opening on the street. In front of the American, through that one small opening in the great dark walls, was the gas-lit yellow of the street, the noise of the passing crowd and traffic—for it was the evening of a market day—but at his back the deep shadow and silence of the old quadrangle.

"It's rather absurd to be locked up in this way," Foley said, joining him; but Sutton replied after a moment, "Why, I was just thinking I rather liked it! Of course it is absurd, but still—" He stopped, as he so often stopped, in the middle of his sentence.

Other times there were when Sutton seemed curiously narrow and stubborn; times when some of his dissenting acquaintances had just been to see him—the elderly undergraduates, with bald heads and big moustaches, whom Foley took to be pupils of Dr. Joseph's when he met them mounting the stairs. One of these dissenting friends of the American's, a friendly, awkward young man, named Abel, who was assistant tutor to Dr. Joseph, and had come with him to Oxford when the college moved there from Birmingham, seemed to have a special supervision over the American. Abel had no very high idea of Oxford and Oxford people, and once, when they met in Sutton's rooms, he and Foley argued a little about the University.

Anyhow he envied Sutton, Abel said at last, turning, as he rose to go, to the silent American; it wasn't everybody who had the luck to live in such a place. But Sutton suddenly coloured, and answered, "You can't blame me, Abel, Dr. Turnpenny wanted me...."

"I'm not blaming you, my friend, it's only envy," Abel replied good-humouredly. He still lingered a moment, looking at the books, and cross-questioning Sutton about his work, and how he spent his time.

Foley, who liked anything new, was interested by this intelligent, tactless man, and wondered why Sutton should be so obviously glad when at last the young dissenter went his way.

IV.

The next day Foley found his friend in a mood of deep depression. He would not go out anywhere, he said; he must spend the afternoon—indeed, he meant to spend all his afternoons now—on his work; he had been neglecting it too long. And though this desperate resolve was often broken, yet from this time on he seemed subject now and then to moods of troubled conscience—moods in which he would shut himself up, sometimes for days, working feverishly alone, or only coming to his friend late at night to talk in an uneasy, interrupted way about the sinfulness of the world, and its pleasures, and how