All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the cobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies.  The young men were now back in their rooms.  Heaven knows what they were doing.  What was it that could drop like that?  And leaning down over a foaming window-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they went and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming, suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz.

The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed.  Although young men still went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements.  Now and then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after dinner.  One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books as the furniture fell.  Were they reading?  Certainly there was a sense of concentration in the air.  Behind the grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs, perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen moved—­ simple young men, these, who would—­but there is no need to think of them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr. Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl:  “Jo—­seph!  Jo—­seph!” and then he ran as hard as ever he could across the court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense pile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on.  But this was a diversion.  There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs, holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that would see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midland towns, clergymen’s sons.  Others read Keats.  And those long histories in many volumes—­surely some one was now beginning at the beginning in order to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must.  That was part of the concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring night—­ dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books, actual chapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared; or Richard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink spills from an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and contented no more, but almost fierce.  Why?  Only perhaps that Keats died young—­one wants to write poetry too and to love—­oh, the brutes!  It’s damnably difficult.  But, after all, not so difficult if on the next staircase, in the large room, there are two, three, five young men all convinced of this—­of brutality, that is, and the clear division between right and wrong.  There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the window being open, one could see how they sat—­legs issuing here, one there crumpled in a corner of the