"You think so?"
"Rather!"
"There's a lot of it," continued his uncle reflectively. "Some of it is tied up rather queerly, too. My executors will have a bit of a job."
He surveyed the impassive Hughie again.
"Don't you want to know who my executors are?" he inquired quite angrily.
"No," said Hughie, who was deep in other thoughts at the moment. "Not my business," he repeated.
"Hughie," said Jimmy Marrable, "you are poor Arthur over again. He was a cursedly irritating chap at times," he added explosively.
A babble of cheerful voices on the staircase announced the return of the safe-looking Mr. Lunn and party. They flowed in, entranced with that gentleman's door-knockers (the countenances of which, by the way, were usually compared by undergraduate critics, not at all unfavourably, with that of their owner), and declared themselves quite ready now to be properly impressed by whatever features of the College Hughie should be pleased to exhibit to them.
One tour round a College is very like another; and we need not therefore follow our friends up and down winding staircases, or in and out of chapels and libraries, while they gaze down on the resting-places of the illustrious dead or gape up at the ephemeral abodes of the undistinguished living.
The expedition was chiefly remarkable (to the observant eye of Mrs. Ames) for the efforts made by its conductor to get lost in suitable company—an enterprise which was invariably frustrated by the resolute conduct of that small but determined hero-worshipper, Miss Joan Gaymer. On one occasion, however, Hughie and Miss Freshwater were left together for a moment. The party had finished surveying the prospect from the roof of the College Chapel, and were painfully groping their way in single file down a spiral staircase. Only Hughie, Miss Freshwater, and the ubiquitous Miss Gaymer were left at the top.