'And now,' she said finally, pulling out her watch, and starting, 'I really mustn't stop one moment longer. I must go back at once. It's dreadfully late. I'm sure I don't know what Mrs. Tradescant will think of me.'
'At least,' Dick cried, standing half in front of her yet again, and blocking up the pathway, 'you'll allow me to write to you?'
Yes, Mary thought, yielding, there'd be no harm in that—no objection to his writing.
Dick gave a little sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. 'Well, that's something!' he cried, much relieved. 'That's always something! If you'll allow me to write to you, I shall feel at any rate you can't quite forget me.'
And, indeed, when a girl lets a young man begin a correspondence, experience teaches me, from long observation, that other events are not unlikely to follow.
CHAPTER VIII. AT 'OXFORD COLLEGE.'
Well, I don't know what you fellows think, but as far as I'm concerned,' Trevor Gillingham remarked, with an expansive wave of his delicate white hand, 'my verdict on the Last of the Plantagenets is simply this: the Prince of the Blood has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.'
It was a fortnight later, in Faussett's rooms in the Chapel Quad at Durham (Chapel Quad is the most fashionably expensive quarter), and a party of raw lads, who took themselves for men, all gathered round their dessert, were engaged in discussing their fellow-undergraduate. The table groaned with dried fruits and mandarin oranges. Faussett himself raised to his lips a glass of Oxford wine-merchant's sherry—'our famous Amontillado as imported, thirty-six shillings the dozen'—and observed in a tone of the severest criticism: 'Oh, the man's a smug; a most unmitigated smug: that's the long and the short of it.'