coat hanging on the wall, and three photographs over the fireplace, the familiar one of Dr. Turnpenny, the dreamy face of Philip Gerard, and a picture that Foley was touched to recognize as his own. All the pictures of Parnassus City, his class mates, the young lady, the street, and college, had disappeared, and a few old religious prints were in their place.

Feeling as if he had intruded where he had no right, Foley turned away; lingering on the stairs, however, for he was loth to leave the house till he had learned something more definite about his friend. Then in the hall below he met the landlady, and began to talk to her about the American. Mr. Sutton was such a kind gentleman, she said, and always very quiet; but lately he had been, she thought, very lonesome and melancholy, and he didn't seem to have any friends in Oxford now. And though he had paid her regular, she couldn't complain of that, yet she was afraid the poor gentleman had very little money. Indeed, he had seemed to be in some trouble, and now he had gone away mysterious-like. The voice of this woman, plainly so poor herself, her anxiety on Sutton's account, remained in Foley's mind in a haunting way. And yet, what could have happened, he asked himself, unable in common sense to imagine any definite trouble, and nevertheless disturbed by a sense of mystery, as if he had suddenly found himself face to face with something more real and sad than most of the sentiments and troubles of his own experience.

Certainly the American had greatly changed—the narrow, rustic young man who had come there first, and the pale scholar Foley had met years afterwards, in the twilight of the garden—there was difference enough between the two! he thought, putting them side by side in memory. But what this change was Sutton had not told; probably never would tell, for in his reserve and reticence he was just the same.

And yet in his letters he had written with much less reserve, Foley remembered. He began to wonder whether, if he should read the letters again, with more attention, he might not find in them some hint of Sutton's trouble. Friendless as the American seemed to be in Oxford, a little advice and sympathy from some one who understood his circumstances, might make perhaps all the difference to him.

When Foley got back to his own rooms, he began looking through the portfolio of papers that he had brought with him from Germany. Yes, there they were, the envelopes addressed in Sutton's neat fine writing. Arranging them in order of their dates, he began to go through them. Letters written during two or three years of his friend's life, in half an hour he could read them all.

XIII.

First came the letters Foley remembered: Sutton's first Long Vacation; his home-sickness in Oxford; his thoughts of Parnassus; the American tourists he would watch and speak with sometimes. Then in the autumn his impression of the chapel, his growing fondness for Oxford, followed by the sudden determination to go home, from which Dr. Joseph had dissuaded him, telling him that there was nothing he need be afraid of in Oxford, or in the Past.

Then came the letters which had come to Foley in the East, and been hardly regarded by him in the hurry of travel. Letters which read pleasantly for the most part, as he went through them now, with their echoes of charming Oxford life—charming for a time, though troubled afterwards. With Dr. Joseph's theology to rely on, and Dr. Joseph's approval of his life, Sutton's uneasy conscience had been at rest for a while, and he had let himself enjoy life without questioning—just the simple human joy of the world and youth, with the weather growing warmer, and the Spring blossoming in the gardens of that beautiful old city, where he was quite at home now.

"I have so enjoyed the Spring," he wrote "your tardy, veering English Spring, with its gusts of snow and black weather, and yet enough warm days to woo from the earth the English flowers that till last year I only knew of in books. But I greet them as old friends now, the primroses, and cowslips, and daffodils.... May is here, the air is full of the greenness of leaves and the songs of birds, the lank rose trees are budding on the Gothic walls, and when I breathe the fragrant air and look about me I rub my eyes, and wonder whether May was ever so beautiful at home. Some beautiful days, of course, I can remember vividly; but I lived then for the most part, I think, among pale thoughts and theories, growing old before I was young, and looking so rarely out—indeed, thinking somehow that it was almost wrong to look out on the beauty and colour of the world...."

He had written a good deal about Oxford; and really it wasn't true, what Foley had told him once, that he didn't deserve to live in so beautiful a place; he did care, and was learning more and more to look at things and enjoy them. On May morning he had gone to Magdalen to hear them salute the rising sun from the tower. "I wish I could describe it all," he wrote, "the streets, as I went out, cold and vacant in the early dawn, the pale flames in the street lamps, and the silence of those rows of sleeping houses, only broken, as I passed under garden walls, by the acute music of the birds awake already in the trees. Birds, millions of them! I never heard such a clamour. At the College gate there was a group of shivering people; and soon they let us in, to climb the steep tower stairs, with its narrow windows here and there in the darkness, with views like little old pictures of grey castles and green country. On the windy platform at the top we found almost all the College gathered, the President, and Fellows, and undergraduates, with the group of white choristers. Gradually, as we waited, the formless sky all round and above us grew white and blue; the sky-line reddened; and then, bringing a sudden hush in the crowded talk, a sudden baring of all our heads, the May sun began to blaze in the East; and as it rose into the sky the boys, facing the light, chanted loud, with their shrill young voices, the old Latin hymn. Well, you can hardly imagine what a solemn moment it was, with the slow hymn, the stately yellow sun rising over all that great view of green country. Turning toward Oxford we saw black figures like dots on the sun-flushed towers and roofs of the other Colleges. Our tower, and, indeed, the whole sky, seemed to rock with the pealing bells; and the undergraduates, engaging in a wild scuffle, tore off each other's caps and gowns, throwing them out into the air, to fall with giddy swirls on the roofs, or into the street below. It seemed almost an outburst of Pagan turbulence, after the Pagan sun-worship, up there on that windy tower-top over the sleeping town! I wrote describing it to Dr. Turnpenny; I only hope he won't be shocked!"

XIV.

In Sir Philip Gerard, whom Foley had known slightly as a youth, of poor and ancient Catholic family, Sutton, it appeared, had found a congenial companion; and he described how they would often spend their afternoons together on the river; rowing up the windings of the Cherwell, past little woods and garden walks, or between the sliding horizons of meadow banks, where the tangled edge of grass and flowers fringed the near sky. "I lie on luxurious cushions in the bow, and Gerard pushes me along, through sleepy sunshine and shadow, and under the unwilling branches of trees; and then, anchoring in some secluded place, we read together some poet or old book, while the endless afternoon glides by, and boats float down the shady river."

"This sounds dreadfully lazy, I'm afraid! But I am taking a rest; I have been feeling rather tired, and Dr. Joseph says I had better do nothing but enjoy myself for a week or two now...."

"... I discovered the other day the old market. I wonder if you know it? It is a delightful place! People from the villages about Oxford have stalls there, and you see the ruddy, old-fashioned cottagers' wives, seated each one behind a fresh bank of vegetables and flowers she herself