Saint Bede’s is one of the most ancient of the minor colleges of Avonsbridge.  Its foundress’s sweet, pale, suffering face, clad in the close coif of the time of the wars of the Roses, still smiles over the fellow’s table in hall, and adorns the walls of combination-room.  The building itself has no great architectural beauty except the beauty of age.  Its courts are gray and still, and its grounds small; in fact, it possesses only the Lodge garden, and a walk between tall trees on the other side of the Avon, which is crossed by a very curious bridge.  The Lodge itself is so close to the river, that from its windows you may drop a stone into the dusky, slowly rippling, sluggish water, which seems quieter and deeper there than at any other college past which it flows.

Saint Bede’s is, as I said, a minor college, rarely numbering more than fifty gownsmen at a time, and maintaining, both as to sports and honors, a mild mediocrity.  For years it had not sent any first-rate man either to boat-race, or cricket-ground, or senate-house.  Lately, however, it had boasted one, quite an Admirable Crichton in his way, who, had his moral equaled his mental qualities, would have carried all before him.  As it was, being discovered in offenses not merely against University authority, but obnoxious to society at large, he had been rusticated.  Though the matter was kept as private as possible, its details being known only to the master, dean and tutor, still it made a nine-day’s talk, not only in the college, but in the town—­until the remorseless wave of daily life, which so quickly closes over the head of either ill-doer or well-doer, closed completely over that of Edwin Uniacke.

Recovering from the shock of his turpitude, the college now reposed in peace upon its slender list of well-conducted and harmless undergraduates, its two or three tutors, and its dozen or so of gray old fellows, who dozed away their evenings in combination-room.  Even such an event as the master’s second marriage had scarcely power to stir Saint Bede’s from its sleepy equanimity.

It was, indeed, a peaceful place.  It had no grand entrance, but in a narrow back street you came suddenly upon its ancient gateway, through which you passed into a mediaeval world.  The clock tower and clock, with an upright sundial affixed below it, marked the first court, whence, through a passage which, as is usual in colleges, had the hall on one hand and the buttery on the other, you entered the second court, round three sides of which ran cloisters of very ugly, very plain, but very ancient architecture.  In a corner of these cloisters was the door of the Lodge—­the master’s private dwelling.