Sorell’s mind was full of mingled emotion—­as torn and jagged as the clouds rushing overhead.  The talk and laughter in the cottage came back to him.  How hollow and vain it sounded in the spiritual ear!  What could ever make up to that poor boy, who could have no more, at the most, than a year or two to live, for the spilt wine of his life?—­the rifled treasure of his genius?  And was it not true to say that his loss had made the profit of the two lovers—­of whom one had been the author of it?  When Palloden and Constance believed themselves to be absorbed in Otto, were they not really playing the great game of sex like any ordinary pair?

It was the question that Otto himself had asked—­that any cynic must have asked.  But Sorell’s tender humanity passed beyond it.  The injury done, indeed, was beyond repair.  But the mysterious impulse which had brought Falloden to the help of Otto was as real in its sphere as the anguish and the pain; aye, for the philosophic spirit, more real than they, and fraught with a healing and disciplining power that none could measure.  Sorell admitted—­half reluctantly—­the changes in life and character which had flowed from it.  He was even ready to say that the man who had proved capable of feeling it, in spite of all past appearances, was “not far from the Kingdom of God.”

Oxford drew nearer and nearer.  Tom Tower loomed before him.  Its great bell rang out.  And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there ran through Scroll’s mind—­his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to the claims of personal happiness—­the vision that Connie had so sharply evoked; of a girl’s brown eyes, and honest look—­the look of a child to be cherished, of a woman to be loved.

Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of the “Antigone”?

“Love, all conquering love, that nestles in the fair cheeks of a maiden—­”

It is perhaps not surprising that Sorell, on this occasion, after he had entered the High, should have taken the wrong turn to St. Cyprian’s, and wakened up to find himself passing through the Turl, when he ought to have been in Radcliffe Square.