But it was plain to all the world, no less than to Mrs. Hooper, that Falloden of Marmion, who had seemed to be in possession of her the night before, had been brusquely banished from her side; that Oxford’s charming newcomer had put her supposed suitor to open contumely; and that young Radowitz reigned in his stead.

* * * * *

Radowitz walked home in a whirl of sensations and recollections that made of the Oxford streets an “insubstantial fairy place,” where only Constance lived.

He entered Marmion about four o’clock in a pearly light of dawn.  Impossible to go to bed or to sleep!

He would change his clothes, go out for a bathe, and walk up into the Cumnor hills.

In the quadrangle he passed a group of men in evening dress returned like himself from the ball.  They were talking loudly, and reading something which was being passed from hand to hand.  As he approached, there was a sudden dead silence.  But in his abstraction and excitement he noticed nothing.

When he had vanished within the doorway of his staircase, Meyrick, who had had a great deal too much champagne, said fiercely—­

“I vote we give that young beggar a lesson!  I still owe him one for that business of a month ago.”

“When he very nearly settled you, Jim,” laughed a Wykehamist, a powerfully built fellow, who had just got his Blue for the Eleven, had been supping freely and was in a mood for any riotous deed.

“That was nothing,” said Meyrick—­“but this can’t be stood!”

And he pointed to the sheet that Falloden, who was standing in the centre of the group, was at the moment reading.  It was the latest number of an Oxford magazine, one of those ephemerides which are born, and flutter, and vanish with each Oxford generation.  It contained a verbatim report of the attack on the Marmion “bloods” made by Radowitz at the dinner of the college debating society about a fortnight earlier.  It was witty and damaging in the highest degree, and each man as he read it had vowed vengeance.  Falloden had been especially mocked in it.  Some pompous tricks of manner peculiar to Falloden in his insolent moods, had been worked into a pseudo-scientific examination of the qualities proper to a “blood,” with the happiest effect.  Falloden grew white as he read it.  Perhaps on the morrow it would be in Constance Bledlow’s hands.  The galling memories of the evening just over were burning too in his veins.  That open humiliation in the sight of Oxford had been her answer to his prayer—­his appeal.  Had she not given him a right to make the appeal?  What girl could give two such rendezvous to a man, and not admit some right on his part to advise, to influence her?  It was monstrous she should have turned upon him so!

And as for this puppy!—­

A sudden gust of passion, of hot and murderous wrath, different from anything he had ever felt before, blew fiercely through the man’s soul.  He wanted to crush—­to punish—­to humiliate.  For a moment he saw red.  Then he heard Meyrick say excitedly:  “This is our last chance!  Let’s cool his head for him—­in Neptune.”