to think I feel in any way aggrieved—­that would be simply absurd—­but more than that, I want to say that I think you behaved quite splendidly at Windlow—­really splendidly!  I hope you don’t think it is impertinent for me to say that, but I want you to know how grateful I am to you—­Jack told me what had happened—­and I thought that if I said nothing, you might feel uncomfortable.  Please don’t feel anything of the kind—­I only wish with all my heart that I could think I could behave as you did if I had been in your place, and I want to be friends.”

“Yes indeed,” said Howard, “I think it is awfully good of you to speak about it.  You won’t expect me,” he added, smiling, “to say that I wish it had turned out otherwise; but I do hope you will be happy, with all my heart; and you will know that you will have a real welcome at Windlow if ever you care to come there.”

The young man shook hands in silence with Howard, and went out with a smile.  “Oh, I shall be all right,” he said.

Jack sate up late with Howard and treated him to a long grumble.

“I do hope to goodness you will come back to Cambridge,” he said.  “You must simply make Maud come.  You must use your influence, your beautiful influence, of which we hear so much.  Seriously, I do miss you here very much, and so does everybody else.  Your pupils are in an awful stew.  They say that you got them through the Trip without boring them, and that Crofts bores them and won’t get them through.  This place rather gets on my nerves now.  The Dons don’t confide in me, and I don’t see things from their angle, as my father says.  I think you somehow managed to keep them reasonable; they are narrow-minded men, I think.”

“This is rather a shower of compliments,” said Howard.  “But I think I very likely shall come back.  I don’t think Maud would mind.”

“Mind!” said Jack, “why you wind that girl round your little finger.  She writes about you as if you were an archangel; and look here, I am sorry I took a gloomy view.  It’s all right; you were the right person.  Freddy Guthrie would never have done for Maud—­he’s in a great way about it still, but I tell him he may be thankful to have escaped.  Maud is a mountain-top kind of girl; she could never have got on without a lot of aspirations, she couldn’t have settled down to the country-house kind of life.  You are a sort of privilege, you know, and all that; Freddy Guthrie would never have been a privilege.”

“That’s rather a horror!” said Howard; “you mustn’t let these things out; you make me nervous!”

Jack laughed.  “If your brother-in-law mayn’t say this to you, I don’t know who may.  But seriously, really quite seriously, you are a bigger person than I thought.  I’ll tell you why.  I had a kind of feeling that you ought not to let me speak to you as you do, that you ought to have snapped my head off.  And then you seemed too much upset by what I said.  I don’t know if it