He stammered, ‘I have—­work.’

She pouted.  ’But I can’t stay beyond tomorrow morning, and I want so much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising.’

‘You are not staying over the night?’ he gasped.

‘Yes, I am,’ and she threw him a dazzling glance.

His heart went pit-a-pat.  ‘Where?’ he murmured.

’Oh, some poky little hotel near the station.  The swell hotels are full.’

He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.

‘So many people have come down already for Commem,’ he said.  ’I suppose they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees.  But hadn’t we better go somewhere and lunch?’

They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and across the quad.  He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness.  After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce’s punt.  The necessities of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel uncomfortable again.  But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river, applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the rippling reflections in the water.

‘Look, look!’ she cried once, pointing skyward.  He stared upwards, expecting a balloon at least.  But it was only ‘Keats’ little rosy cloud’, she explained.  It was not her fault if he did not find the excursion unreservedly idyllic.

‘How stupid,’ she reflected, ’to keep all those nice boys cooped up reading dead languages in a spot made for life and love.’

‘I’m afraid they don’t disturb the dead languages so much as you think,’ he reassured her, smiling.  ’And there will be plenty of love-making during Commem.’

‘I am so glad.  I suppose there are lots of engagements that week.’

‘Oh, yes—­but not one per cent come to anything.’

‘Really?  Oh, how fickle men are!’

That seemed rather question-begging, but he was so thrilled by the implicit revelation that she could not even imagine feminine inconstancy, that he forebore to draw her attention to her inadequate logic.

So childish and thoughtless indeed was she that day that nothing would content her but attending a ‘Viva’, which he had incautiously informed her was public.

‘Nobody will notice us,’ she urged with strange unconsciousness of her loveliness.  ‘Besides, they don’t know I’m not your sister.’

‘The Oxford intellect is sceptical,’ he said, laughing.  ’It cultivates philosophical doubt.’