But as the squire walked back to his hotel he was deeply moved at the Radical views his son now held.  He could not understand these new notions of young men, and thought them mischievous and bad.  At the same time, he was too fair a man to try to dragoon his son out of anything which he really believed.  The fact had begun to dawn on the squire that the world had changed a good deal since his time; while Tom, on his part, valued his father’s confidence and love above his own opinions.  By degrees the honest beliefs of father and son no longer looked monstrous to one another, and the views of each of them were modified.

* * * * *

One more look must be taken at the old college.  Our hero is up in the summer term, keeping his three weeks’ residence, the necessary preliminary to an M.A. degree.  We find him sitting in Hardy’s rooms; tea is over, scouts out of college, candles lighted, and silence reigning, except when distant sounds of mirth come from some undergraduates’ rooms on the opposite side of the quad.

“Why can’t you give a fellow his degree quietly,” says Tom, “without making him come and kick his heels here for three weeks?”

“You ungrateful dog!  Do you mean to say you haven’t enjoyed coming back, and sitting in dignity in the bachelors’ seats in chapel and at the bachelors’ table in hall, and thinking how much wiser you are than the undergraduates?  Besides your old friends want to see you, and you ought to want to see them.”

“Well, I’m very glad to see you again, old fellow.  But who else is there I care to see?  My old friends are gone, and the youngsters look on me as a sort of don, and I don’t appreciate the dignity.  You have never broken with the place.  And then you always did your duty, and have done the college credit.  You can’t enter into the feelings of a fellow who wasted three parts of his time here.”

“Come, come, Tom!  You might have read more, certainly, and taken a higher degree.  But, after all, I believe your melancholy comes from your not being asked to pull in the boat.”

“Perhaps it does.  Don’t you call it degrading to be pulling in the torpid in one’s old age?”

“Mortified vanity!  It’s a capital boat.  I wonder how we should have liked to have been turned out for some bachelor just because he had pulled a good oar in his day?”

“Not at all.  I don’t blame the youngsters.  By the way, they’re an uncommonly nice set.  Much better behaved in every way than we were.  Why, the college is a different place altogether.  And as you are the only new tutor, it must have been your doing.  Now I want to know your secret?”

“I’ve no secret, except taking a real interest in all that the men do, and living with them as much as I can.  You may guess it isn’t much of a trial to me to steer the boat down, or run on the bank and coach the crew.  And now the president of St. Ambrose himself comes out to see the boat.  But I don’t mean to stop up more than another year now at the outside.  I have been tutor nearly three years, and that’s about long enough.”