"That folly, and worse than folly, of yours, down in the country."
"I was very foolish, very; but was there anything worse than that in it?" John pondered.
"The thought of foolishness is sin," observed the schoolmaster, severely.
"God forgive me!" prayed John, penitently.
"He will if you ask Him truly and sincerely. And He will help you too; but you have something to do for yourself, in which you must ask this help. You must put away from you those vain thoughts, those captivating remembrances. You have no business to be thinking admiringly of any daughter of Eve just now; and of her (you know who I mean) least of all."
"True, true," John confessed.
"Well, then, what a blockhead you must be to go about dreaming and mooning as you have done since you got back to Oxford. Why, the other evening, when you went for that stroll round the Magdalen Water Walk, you looked so distraught, and played such moon-struck antics, that a pair of undergraduates burst out in a merry laugh when you passed them."
"I heard them," John reflected.
"You must have done with this nonsense," the schoolmaster went on. "You have done mischief enough down there already, for anything we know: and the only wise thing you did was when you ran away from the place. Now you must abandon all that folly, and pray to be forgiven the sin there was in it, whether more or less."
"God helping me, I will," said John again, and the best thing he could do or say, it was.