“Don’t distress yourself, please.  We shall catch them up before we get to Merton Street.  And this only pays the very smallest fraction of your debt!  I understood that if my mother wrote—­”

She coloured brightly.

“I didn’t promise!” she said hastily.  “And I found the Hoopers were counting on me.”

“No doubt.  Oh, I don’t grumble.  But when friends—­suppose we take the old path under the wall?  It is much less crowded.”

And before she knew where she was, she had been whisked out of the stream of visitors and undergraduates, and found herself walking almost in solitude in the shadow of one of the oldest walls in Oxford, the Cathedral towering overhead, the crowd moving at some distance on their right.

“That’s better,” said Falloden coolly.  “May I go on?  I was saying that when one friend disappoints another—­bitterly!—­there is such a thing as making up!”

There were beautiful notes in Falloden’s deep voice, when he chose to employ them.  He employed them now, and the old thrill of something that was at once delight and fear ran through Constance.  But she looked him in the face, apparently quite unmoved.

“Now it is you who are piling it on!  You will use such tragic expressions for the most trivial things.  Of course, I am sorry if—­”

“Then make amends!”—­he said quickly.  “Promise me—­if the mare turns out well—­you will ride in Lathom Woods—­on Saturday?”

His eyes shone upon her.  The force of the man’s personality seemed to envelope her, to beat down the resistance which, as soon as he was out of her sight, the wiser mind in her built up.

She hesitated—­smiled.  And again the smile—­or was it the May sun and wind?—­gave her that heightening, that touch of brilliance that a face so delicate must often miss.

Falloden’s fastidious sense approved her wholly:  the white dress; the hat that framed her brow; the slender gold chains which rose and fell on her gently rounded breast; her height and grace.  Passion beat within him.  He hung on her answer.

“Saturday—­impossible!  I am not free till Monday, at least.  And what about the groom?” She looked up.

“I shall parade him to-morrow, livery, horse and all.  I undertake he shall give satisfaction.  The Lathom Woods just now are a dream!”

“It is all a dream!” she said, looking round her at the beauty of field and tree, of the May clouds, and the grey college walls—­youth and youth’s emotion speaking in the sudden softening of her eyes.

He saw—­he felt her—­yielding.

“You’ll come?”

“I—­I suppose I may as well ride in Lathom Woods as anywhere else.  You have a key?”

“The groom will have it.  I meet you there.”

She flushed a bright pink.

“That might have been left vague!”

“How are you to find your way through those woods without a guide?” he protested.