“No, but in your case I think it’s highly advisable.  You haven’t had a public school education, and inasmuch as I stand to you in loco parentis I should consider myself most culpable if I didn’t do everything possible to give you a fair start.  You haven’t got a very large sum of money to launch yourself upon the world, and I want you to spend what you have to the best advantage.  Of course, if you can’t get a scholarship, you can’t and that’s the end of it.  But, rather than that you should miss the University I will supplement from my own savings enough to carry you through three years as a commoner.”

Tears stood in Mark’s eyes.

“You’ve already been far too generous,” he said.  “You shan’t spend any more on me.  I’m sorry I talked in that foolish way.  It was really only a kind of affectation of indifference.  I’m feeling pretty sore with myself for being such a failure; but I’ll have another shot and I hope I shall do better.”

Mark as a last chance tried for a close scholarship at St. Osmund’s Hall for the sons of clergymen.

“It’s a tiny place of course,” said the Rector.  “But it’s authentic Oxford, and in some ways perhaps you would be happier at a very small college.  Certainly you’d find your money went much further.”

The examination was held in the Easter vacation, and when Mark arrived at the college he found only one other candidate besides himself.  St. Osmund’s Hall with its miniature quadrangle, miniature hall, miniature chapel, empty of undergraduates and with only the Principal and a couple of tutors in residence, was more like an ancient almshouse than an Oxford college.  Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth called Emmett who was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering, moved about the precincts upon tiptoe like people trespassing from a high road.

On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr. Lidderdale or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine.  After dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed himself to the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the comparative fitness of his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle’s bounty.  The Reverend Thomas Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman for four years.  Mark was shy enough under the Principal’s courtly inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions.  His tongue appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as “yes” or “no.”  Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute.  When the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had upon the Principal.  Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett.