But the Master merely thought that she was feeling the perennial spell of the Oxford beauty.

“You are going to like Oxford, I hope?”

“Yes—­” said Constance, a little reluctantly.  “Oh, of course I shall like it.  But it oppresses me—­rather.”

“I know!” he said eagerly—­always trying to place himself in contact with the young mind and life, always seeking something from them in which he was constantly disappointed.  “Yes, we all feel that!  We who are alive must always fight the past, though we owe it all we have.  Oxford has been to me often a witch—­a dangerous—­almost an evil witch.  I seemed to see her—­benumbing the young forces of the present.  And the scientific and practical men, who would like to scrap her, have sometimes seemed to me right.  And then one changes—­one changes!”

His voice dropped.  All that was slightly grotesque in his outer man, the broad flat head, the red hair, the sharp wedge-like chin, disappeared for Constance in the single impression of his eyes—­pale blue, intensely melancholy, and most human.

“Take up some occupation—­some study—­” he said to her gently.  “You won’t be long here; but still, ask us for what we can give.  In Oxford one must learn something—­or teach something.  If not, life here goes sour.”

Constance repeated Sorell’s promise to teach her Greek.

“Excellent!” said the Master.  “You will be envied.  Sorell is a capital fellow!  And one of the ablest of our younger scholars—­though of course”—­the speaker drew himself up with a slight acerbity—­“he and I belong to different schools of criticism.  He was devoted to your mother.”

Constance assented dumbly.

“And shows already”—­thought the Master—­“some dangerous signs of being devoted to you.  Poor wretch!” Aloud he said—­“Ah, here they come.  I must get some more chairs.”

The drawing-room party joined them, and the gathering lasted a little longer.  Sorell walked up and down with Constance.  She liked him increasingly—­could not help liking him.  And apart from his personal charm, he recalled all sorts of pleasant things and touching memories to her.  But he was almost oppressively refined and scrupulous and high-minded.  “He is too perfect!” she thought rebelliously.  “One can’t be as good as that.  It isn’t allowed.”

As to Mrs. Mulholland, Constance felt herself taken possession of—­mothered—­by that lady.  She could not understand why, but though rather puzzled and bewildered, she did not resist.  There was something, indeed, in the generous dark eyes that every now and then touched the girl’s feeling intolerably, as though it reminded her of a tenderness she had been long schooling herself to do without.

“Come and see me, my dear, whenever you like.  I have a house in St. Giles, and all my husband’s books.  I do a lot of things—­I am a guardian—­I work at the schools—­the town schools for the town children, et cetera.  We all try to save our souls by committees nowadays.  But my real business is to talk, and make other people talk.  So I am always at home in the evenings after dinner, and a good many people come.  Bring Nora sometimes.  Alice doesn’t like me.  Your aunt will let you come—­though we don’t know each other very well.  I am very respectable.”