The real crisis was over.  He had managed to pass through the eye of the storm, and was drifting into the skirts of it, conscious of an escape from utter shipwreck.

His visits to the Choughs became shorter; he never stayed behind now after the other men, and avoided interviews with Patty alone as diligently as he had sought them before.

Patty, unable to account for this fresh change of manner, was piqued, and ready to revenge herself in a hundred little ways.  If she had been really in love with him it would have been a different matter; but she was not.  In the last six weeks she certainly had often had visions of the pleasures of being a lady and keeping servants, but her liking was not more than skin deep.

Of late, indeed, she had been much more frightened than attracted by the conduct of her admirer, and really felt it a relief, notwithstanding her pique, when he retired into a less demonstrative state.

Before the end of that summer term Tom had it made up with Hardy, and it was Hardy who, at Tom’s request, called in at the Choughs, just to see how things were going on.  Tom saw at a glance that something had happened when Hardy appeared again.

“What is it?  She is not ill?” he said quickly.

“No; quite well, her aunt says.”

“You didn’t see her, then?”

“No the fact is, she has gone home.”

IV.—­The Master’s Term

The years speed by, bringing their changes to St. Ambrose.  Hardy is a fellow and tutor of the college in Tom’s second year, and Drysdale has been requested to remove his name from the books.  Tom is all for politics now, and the theories he propounds in the Union gain him the name of Chartist Brown.

In his third year, Hardy often brought him down from high talk of “universal democracy” and “the good cause” by insisting on making the younger man explain what he really meant.  And though Tom suffered under this severe treatment, in the end he generally came round to acknowledge the reasonableness of Hardy’s methods of argument.

It was a trying year to Tom, this third and last year; full of large dreams and small performances, of hopes and struggles, ending in failure and disappointment.  The common pursuits of the place had lost their freshness, and with it much of their charm.  He was beginning to feel himself in a cage, and to beat against the bars of it.

Squire Brown was passing through Oxford, and paid his son a visit in the last term.

Tom gave a small wine-party, which went off admirably, and the squire enlarged upon the great improvement in young men and habits of the university, especially in the matter of drinking.  Tom had only opened three bottles of port.  In his time the men would have drunk certainly not less than a bottle a man.