“I don’t think it’s a thing to be sorry for,” said the girl.  “I wish we knew more people.  It’s rather forlorn—­”

“Oh, will you let me introduce some of the fellows to you?  They’ll be so glad.”

“If you’ll tell them how forlorn I said I was,” said the girl, with a smile.

“Oh, no, no, no!  I understand that.  And I assure you that I didn’t suppose—­But of course!” he arrested himself in the superfluous reassurance he was offering, “All that goes without saying.  Only there are some of the fellows coming back to the law school, and if you’ll allow me—­”

“We shall be very happy indeed, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Pasmer, behind him.

“Oh, thank you ever so much, Mrs. Pasmer.”  This was occasion for another burst of laughter with him.  He seemed filled with the intoxication of youth, whose spirit was in the bright air of the day and radiant in the young faces everywhere.  The paths intersecting one another between the different dormitories under the drooping elms were thronged with people coming and going in pairs and groups; and the academic fete, the prettiest flower of our tough old Puritan stem, had that charm, at once sylvan and elegant, which enraptures in the pictured fables of the Renaissance.  It falls at that moment of the year when the old university town, often so commonplace and sometimes so ugly, becomes briefly and almost pathetically beautiful under the leafage of her hovering elms and in, the perfume of her syringas, and bathed in this joyful tide of youth that overflows her heart.  She seems fit then to be the home of the poets who have loved her and sung her, and the regret of any friend of the humanities who has left her.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning forward a little to speak to her daughter, and ignoring a remark of the Professor’s, “did you ever see so many pretty costumes?”

“Never,” said the girl, with equal intensity.

“Well, it makes you feel that you have got a country, after all,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, in a sort of apostrophe to her European self.  “You see splendid dressing abroad, but it’s mostly upon old people who ought to be sick and ashamed of their pomps and vanities.  But here it’s the young girls who dress; and how lovely they are!  I thought they were charming in the Gymnasium, but I see you must get them out-of-doors to have the full effect.  Mr. Mavering, are they always so prettily dressed on Class Day?”

“Well, I’m beginning to feel as if it wouldn’t be exactly modest for me to say so, whatever I think.  You’d better ask Mrs. Saintsbury; she pretends to know all about it.”

“No, I’m bound to say they’re not,” said the Professor’s wife candidly.  “Your daughter,” she added, in a low tone for all to hear, “decides that question.”

“I’m so glad you said that, Mrs. Saintsbury,” said the young man.  He looked at the girl; who blushed with a pleasure that seemed to thrill to the last fibre of her pretty costume.