"I'll see you damned first!" said Peter. "I've no use for these people. Come on, Graham, let's go back."

Kenyon's face was wreathed in smiles. "It can't be done, dear lad," he said. "Your mother would be the last person on earth to permit you to be discourteous to our two distinguished Dons, and by this time in all human probability Betty will be preparing for bed."

Peter had been building all his hopes on another hour with Betty. She was leaving Oxford with his people the next afternoon and he wanted above all things, however incoherently, to let her know something of the state of his feelings. He had never been so angry with Kenyon before. "Curse you!" he said. "You've spoiled everything. If you must play about with these chorus girls why can't you do it alone? Why drag me in?"

Kenyon's eyes narrowed. "Only the angels die young, Peter, my friend," he said. "As I've been obliged to tell you before, you stand a pretty good chance of an early demise. Have you ever heard the word 'priggish'? For a whole week I've played the game by you and devoted myself, lock, stock and barrel, to your family. Mere sportsmanship demands that you make some slight return to me by joining my little party to-night. Don't you agree with me, Graham?"

Graham's vanity was vastly appealed to by the fact that this perfect man of the world had taken him into his intimacy. Hitherto he hadn't met English chorus girls. He rather liked the idea. "Why," he said, "I can't see why we shouldn't go. I'm with you, anyway. Come on, Peter. Be a sport."

But Peter held his ground. He had all the more reason for so doing because he had met Betty. "All right!" he said. "You two can do what you jolly well like. Cut me out of it. I shall turn in. If that's being priggish—fine. Good-night!"

He wheeled round and marched off, and as he passed beneath the windows of the Randolph Hotel he drew up short for a moment and with a touch of knightliness which was quite unself-conscious he bared his head beneath the window of the room in which he believed that Betty was to sleep, but which, as a matter of fact, harboured a short, fat, wheezy Anglo-Indian with a head as bald as a billiard ball.

Kenyon disguised his annoyance under an air of characteristic imperturbability. "Well, that's our Peter to the life," he said, taking Graham's eager arm. "He's a sort of Don Quixote—a very pure and perfect person. One of these days he's likely to come an unholy cropper, and that's to my way of thinking what he most needs. I don't agree with a man's being a total abstainer in anything. It narrows him and makes him provincial. Then, too, a man who fancies himself as better than his fellows is apt to wear a halo under his hat, and that disgusting trick ruins friendship and leads to a hasty and ill-considered marriage with the first good actress who catches him on the hop and makes use of his lamentable ignorance. Come along, brother, we'll see life together."

"Fine!" said Graham. "Me for life all the time."

So these two,—the one curiously old and the other dangerously young,—made their way to the stage door of the Theatre Royal and waited among the little crowd of undergraduates for the moment when the ladies of the chorus should have retouched their make-up and be ready for further theatricalisms.