Private it could hardly be called; for, like all these lodges of colleges, it had an atmosphere most anti-home like, which at first struck you as extremely painful.  Its ancientness, both of rooms and furniture, added to this feeling.  When you passed through the small entrance hall, up the stone staircase, and into a long, narrow, mysterious gallery, looking as it must have looked for two centuries at least, you felt an involuntary shiver, as of warm, human, daily life brought suddenly into contact with the pale ghosts of the past.  You could not escape the haunting thought that these oaken tables were dined at, these high-backed chairs sat upon, these black-framed, dirt-obscured portraits gazed at and admired by people, once flesh and blood like yourself, who had become skeletons—­nay, mere dust, centuries before you were born.  Also, that other people would be dining, sitting, gazing, and talking in this very same spot long after you yourself had become a skeleton in your turn.

This impression of the exceeding mutability of all things, common to most very old houses, was stronger than ordinary in this house, whose owners did not even hold it by ancestral right, so as to find and leave behind some few ancestral ties and memories, but came and went, with all that belonged to them; the only trace of their occupancy and themselves being a name on the college books, or a solitary portrait on the college wall.  The old dervish’s saying to the Eastern king, “Sire, this is not a place, but a caravanserai,” might have been applied here only too truly.  It was not a home, it was the lodge of a college.

Until eighteen months ago, the date of Dr. Grey’s appointment, there had not been a woman’s face or a child’s foot about it for a hundred and fifty years.  All the masters had been unmarried—­grim, gray fellows—­ advanced in years.  Dr. Arnold Grey, whose fellowship had terminated early, and who had afterward been tutor and dean, was the youngest master that had ever been known at Saint Bede’s; and his election might consequently have been unpopular had he not been personally so much liked, and had there not happened immediately afterward that scandal about Edwin Uniacke.  Therein he acted so promptly and wisely, that the sleepy, timid old dons as well as the Uniacke family—­for the lad was highly connected—­were thankful that this unlucky business had not occurred in the time of the late master, who was both old and foolish, and would have made it the talk of all England, instead of hushing it up, with the prudent decision of Dr. Grey, so that now it was scarcely spoken of beyond the college walls.