clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete.  The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society; he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester.  He and Mark were staying at a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master.  It was difficult for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline.  Yet everybody in Jex’s house called him Jex; and when you looked at that delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be called anything else except Jex.

For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of St. Osmund’s Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his surrender of the scholarship to Emmett.  What was Emmett doing now?  Had his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have brought him?  Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or five men in whose charge he had been left.  He was tired of being continually rescued from drowning in their conversation.  Their intentional courtesy galled him.  He felt like a negro chief being shown the sights of England by a tired equerry.  It was a fine summer day, and he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match.  He sat down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side was in.  Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds.  The trees and towers of Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to put himself in the picture.  The grass beneath the oak was scattered with a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens and silver disks that Mark set himself to count.

“Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn,” he muttered.  “Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six.”

“You’re ten out,” said a voice.  “We want fifty-six to tie, fifty-seven to win.”

Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he remembered seeing once at the Mission was preparing to sit down beside him.  He was a tall youth, fair and freckled and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but lacking any hint of condescension in his manner.