things too familiar to the golden youth of the period to be even noticed.  He had felt when he first entered the little drawing-room of the cottage that Mrs. Goddard herself belonged, or had belonged, to that delicious unknown world of ease where the question of expense was never considered, much less mentioned.  In her own eyes she was indeed living in a state approaching to penury, but the spectacle of her pictures, her furniture and her bibelots had impressed John with a very different idea.  The squire’s invitation, asking him to spend a week at the Hall, seemed in a moment to put him upon the same level as the woman to whom he believed himself so devotedly attached.  To his mind the ideal woman could not but be surrounded by a luxurious atmosphere of her own.  To enter the charmed precincts of those surroundings seemed to John equivalent to being transported from the regions of the Theocritan to the level of the Anacreontic ode, from the pastoral, of which he had had too much, to the aristocratic, of which he felt that he could not have enough.  It was a natural feeling in a very young man of his limited experience.

He stayed some hours at the vicarage.  Both Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose thought him changed in the short time which had elapsed since they had seen him.  He had grown more grave; he was certainly more of a man.  The great contest he had just sustained with so much honour had left upon his young face its mark, an air of power which had not formerly been visible there; even his voice seemed to have grown deeper and rounder, and his words carried more weight.  The good vicar, who had seen several generations of students, already distinguished in John Short the budding “don,” and rubbed his hands with great satisfaction.

John asked few questions but found himself obliged to answer many concerning his recent efforts.  He would have liked to say something about Mrs. Goddard, but he remembered with some awe and much aversion the circumstances in which he had last quitted the vicarage, and he held his peace; whereby he again rose in Mrs. Ambrose’s estimation.  He made up for his silence by speaking effusively of the squire’s kindness in asking him to the Hall; forgetting perhaps the relief he had felt when he escaped from Billingsfield after Christmas without being again obliged to shake hands with Mr. Juxon.  Things looked very differently now, however.  He felt himself to be somebody in the world, and that distressing sense of inferiority which had perhaps been at the root of his jealousy against the squire was gone, swallowed in the sense of triumph.  His face was pale, perhaps, from overwork, but there was a brilliancy in his eyes and an incisiveness in his speech which came from the confidence of victory.  He now desired nothing more than to meet the squire, feeling sure that he should receive his congratulations, and though he stayed some hours in conversation with his old friends, in imagination he was already at the Hall.  The squire had not