When Peter laughed at her tenderly, attempting to coax her into braver thoughts, she clung to him, searching his face to discover the odd little boy who had asked such curious questions. For his sake she would smile through her tears, saying, “I’m just a silly woman, getting old, Peter. Don’t think that I grudge you anything. I don’t, I don’t, only—only it’s the first spreading of wings—the struggling out of the nest.”

It was true—truer than she fancied; there was Cherry.

However late he worked in those last days, however noiseless he made his feet upon the stairs, she heard him. Creeping from her room, she would stand white-robed beside his bed, stoop above his face on the pillow and tuck him up warmly. It wouldn’t be for much longer—he was almost a man.

And Billy—he tried to laugh her out of a sentiment which he fought down in himself. Manlike, he disguised his feelings. He took so much interest in the preparations, that it might have been he, instead of Peter, who was going up to Oxford. By day he pretended to be cheerful; but at night, when she lay down beside him, after her excursions to Peter’s bedroom, he would take her in his arms, whispering the old endearments, “Golden little Nan,” and “Princess Pepperminta,” just to let her understand that, whoever went from her, he would be left.

One October afternoon Mr. Grace, the herald of Topbury’s great occasions, drew up against the pavement. Boxes were carried out. Cat’s Meat shuffled away into the distance. At the end of the Terrace, Peter leant from the window; they were still there, waving from the steps. He had begged them not to come to the station; he knew they would break down. He turned the corner—his flight had begun in earnest. While familiar sights lasted, he was conscious not of adventure, but depression. Yes, that was the house from the dusk of whose garden a hand had stretched out to grasp him. Strange, and this was the same Christmas cab! Inanimate things hadn’t changed; it was he who had altered.

Then came the excitement of Paddington—undergrads with golf-bags slung across their shoulders; others who were spectacled and looked learned; still others with ties of contrasting hues and secret significance—a crowd superbly young and enthusiastic, which did its best to appear blasé. And then the rush of the train, the exalted sense of opportunity, the overwhelming consciousness of manhood, and that first night of romantic speculation within the gray walls of Calvary College! Bells, hanging so high and sounding so mellow that they seemed to swing from clouds, struck out the hours. His mother had heard them, those same bells, in her girlhood. By craning out, he could see the window from which Jehane had caught first sight of his father and had called Nan’s attention. He was beginning his journey at the spot where his parents’ journey, halfway over, had commenced. Would he and Cherry tell their children stories of where and how they had met? He and Cherry! It was of her that he was thinking when Harry Arran entered and found him seated among his partly opened boxes.

“Tried to reach you all summer,” Peter said.

Harry was taking stock of the room’s contents. “I say, old boy, you’ve brought no end of furniture. You’ll be quite a swell.—— What’s that? Tried to reach us with letters, did you? We never got one of ‘em. Never knew our next address ourselves. Just went wandering, you know. My brother’s such an erratic chap.”

Peter turned away, so that his face would not be seen, and spoke in an offhand manner. “Cherry with you?”

The question tickled Harry. He straddled his legs and watched his friend’s back, tilting his head toward his shoulder with a magpie expression of impertinent knowledge. “Cherry with us! No, jolly fear. She’s a nice kid and all that, but we weren’t out for love-affairs. Fact is, I was trying to make that silly ass brother of mine forget one woman. We carried knapsacks and went almost in rags. But what made you ask?”