She was silent a moment, then she said with decision: 

“I must overtake my people.”

“You shall.  I want you to talk to my mother—­and—­you have still to introduce me to your aunt and cousins.”

Mirth crept into her eyes.  The process of taming him had begun.

* * * * *

Falloden on the way back to his lodgings handed over his family to the tender offices of Meyrick and a couple of other gilded youths, who had promised to look after them for the evening.  They were to dine at the Randolph, and go to a college concert.  Falloden washed his hands of them, and shut himself up for five or six hours’ grind, broken only by a very hasty meal.  The thought of Constance hovered about him—­but his will banished it.  Will and something else—­those aptitudes of brain which determined his quick and serviceable intelligence.

When after his frugal dinner he gave himself in earnest to the article in a French magazine, on a new French philosopher, which had been recommended to him by his tutor as likely to be of use to him in his general philosophy paper, his mind soon took fire; Constance was forgotten, and he lost himself in the splendour shed by the original and creative thought of a great man, climbing, under his guidance, as the night wore on, from point to point, and height to height, amid the Oxford silence, broken only by the chiming bells, and a benighted footfall in the street outside, until he seemed to have reached the bounds of the phenomenal and to be close on that outer vastness whence stream the primal forces—­Die Muetter—­as Goethe called them—­whose play is with the worlds.

Then by way of calming the brain before sleep, he fell upon some notes to be copied and revised, on the “Religious Aspects of Greek Drama,” and finally amused himself with running through an ingenious “Memoria Technica” on the 6th Book of the Ethics which he had made for himself during the preceding winter.

Then work was done, and he threw it from him with the same energy as that wherewith he had banished the remembrance of Constance some hours before.  Now he could walk his room in the May dawn, and think of her, and only of her.  With all the activity of his quickened mental state, he threw himself into the future—­their rides together—­their meetings, few and measured till the schools were done—­then!—­all the hours of life, and a man’s most obstinate effort, spent in the winning of her.  He knew well that she would be difficult to win.

But he meant to win her—­and before others could seriously approach her.  He was already nervously jealous of Sorell—­and contemptuously jealous of Radowitz.  And if they could torment him so, what would it be when Constance passed into that larger world of society to which sooner or later she was bound?  No, she was to be wooed and married now.  The Falloden custom was to marry early—­and a good custom too.  His father would approve, and money from the estate would of course be forthcoming.  Constance was on her father’s side extremely well-born; the Hooper blood would soon be lost sight of in a Risborough and Falloden descent.  She was sufficiently endowed; and she had all the grace of person and mind that a Falloden had a right to look for in his wife.