as a scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet house, forbade the slightest breath of scandal in connection with these girl-friendships.  Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself, whose essays he read, whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he watched over, and in whose subsequent love affairs he took the liveliest interest, were rarely or never plain to look upon.  He chose them for their wits, but also for their faces.  His men friends observed it with amusement.  The little notes he wrote them, the birthday presents he sent them—­generally some small worn copy of a French or Latin classic—­his coveted invitations, or congratulations, were all marked by a note of gallantry, stately and old-fashioned like the furniture of his drawing-room, but quite different from anything he ever bestowed upon the men students of his college.

Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites.  One, a delicious creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband; and the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest hand and foot, whom he and others were hopefully piloting towards a second class at least—­possibly a first—­in the Honour Classical School, had broken down in health, so that her mother and a fussy doctor had hurried her away to a rest-cure in Switzerland, and thereby slit her academic life and all her chances of fame.  Both had been used to come—­independently—­for the Master was in his own, way far too great a social epicure to mix his pleasures—­to tea on Sundays; to sit on one side of a blazing fire, while the Master sat on the other, a Persian cat playing chaperon on the rug between, and the book-lined walls of the Master’s most particular sanctum looking down upon them; while in the drawing-room beyond, Miss Wenlock, at the tea-table, sat patiently waiting till her domestic god should declare the seance over, allow her to make tea, and bring in the young and honoured guest.  And now both charmers had vanished from the scene and had left no equals behind.  The Master, who possessed the same sort of tact in training young women that Lord Melbourne showed in educating the girl-Queen, was left without his most engaging occupation.

Ah!—­that good fellow, Sorell, was bringing her up to him.

“Master, Lady Constance would like to be introduced to you.”

The Master was immensely flattered.  Why should she wish to be introduced to such an old fogey?  But there she was, smiling at him.

“You knew my father.  I am sure you did!”

His elderly heart was touched, his taste captured at once.  Sorell had engineered it all perfectly.  His description of the girl had fired the Master; and his sketch of the Master in the girl’s ear, as a kind of girlhood’s arbiter, had amused and piqued her.  “Yes, do introduce me!  Will he ever ask me to tea?  I should be so alarmed!”