“I’d as soon enter Paradise on stilts!” he reflected, and smiled at his witty conceit.…
And the smile had not faded from his full, attractive lips, when the bespoken hansom scampered up, guided by the taxi. Ordering the latter to collect his multitudinous luggage, he engaged the former to drive him to his destination.
“Wallace!” he cried, and leapt lightly into the graceful equipage.
With hooves gaily a-clatter over cobbles and causeway, the hansom wended its romantic way through the mazy purlieus which lead the traveller into the heart of this city that men call Oxford and the gods call Youth. Gaveston longed for a cockle-shell in his hat, to symbolize this mystic, dreamed-of wayfaring, and when at long last his driver reined in before a Gothic gateway darkly overhung by a stalwart, sky-crowned tower, he knew that his sense of the fitting had in all sooth been justified. He threw the fare to the jarvey, and crossed the threshold of his historic college, nodding kindly to the bewhiskered porter’s obsequious welcome.
“I must keep this up,” he murmured pensively in the vaulted porch.
He was now a Wallace man.…
Later that evening Gaveston gazed hungrily out over the Wallace quadrangle from the mullioned windows of the rooms allotted to him. “Staircase XVII … staircase XVII,” he kept repeating. What a place it was! Never had his utmost dreams envisaged this romantic reckoning by stairways.
And this was Wallace at last!