“Why did you hate me so?” he said, breathing quickly.  “What had I done to you?”

“I didn’t hate you,” said Falloden thickly.  “I was mad.”

“Because you were jealous?  What a fool you were!  She never cared a brass farthing for me—­except as she, does now.  She would like to nurse me—­and give me back my music.  But she can’t—­and you can’t.”

There was silence again.  Otto’s chest heaved.  As far as he could with his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion.  And at last he shook off emotion—­with a laugh in which there was no mirth.

“Well, at least, I shouldn’t make such a row now as I used to do—­practising.”

Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, by which the “bloods,” in their first attack upon him, had tried to silence his piano.

“Can’t you play at all?” he said at last, choosing the easiest of several remarks that presented themselves.

“I get about somehow on the keys.  It’s better than nothing.  And I’m writing something for my degree.  It’s rather good.  If I could only keep well!” said the boy impatiently.  “It’s this damned health that gets in the way.”

Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.

“Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they’re now talking about—­could you stand that?”

“I would have a room where I didn’t hear it.  That would be all right.”

“There’s a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago,” said Otto excitedly—­“a marvellous electric invention a man’s at work on, where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you get Rubinstein—­or Madame Schumann or my country-man, Paderewski, who’s going to beat everybody.  It isn’t finished yet.  But it won’t be for the likes of me.  It’ll cost at least a thousand pounds.”

“They’ll get cheaper,” said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows on knees, and eyes fixed on his companion.  It seemed to him he was talking in a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparently was going to come to pass.  At any rate Radowitz had not refused.  He sat with the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding its long ears.  He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and when he saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy, hesitating step, he sprang up eagerly to greet her.  But there was another figure behind her.  It was Sorell; and at sight of him “something sealed” the boy’s lips.  He looked round at Falloden, and dropped back into his chair.

Falloden rose from his seat abruptly.  A formal and scarcely perceptible greeting passed between him and Sorell.  All Falloden’s irritable self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cyprian tutor.  He was not going to stay and cry peccavi any more in the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world.  But it was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden and Connie Bledlow’s company.