sofa; and, presumably, for you could not see him, somebody stood by the fender, talking.  Anyhow, Jacob, who sat astride a chair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing.  The answer came from the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air, then replaced.  Jacob wheeled round.  He had something to say to that, though the sturdy red-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging his head slowly from side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he dug the point of it again and again into a knot in the table, as if affirming that the voice from the fender spoke the truth—­which Jacob could not deny.  Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he might find something to say to it—­indeed his lips opened—­only then there broke out a roar of laughter.

The laughter died in the air.  The sound of it could scarcely have reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the opposite side of the court.  The laughter died out, and only gestures of arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room.  Was it an argument?  A bet on the boat races?  Was it nothing of the sort?  What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?

A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the enclosing buildings—­chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick and building for a May night, perhaps.  And then before one’s eyes would come the bare hills of Turkey—­sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers, and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in the stream to beat linen on the stones.  The stream made loops of water round their ankles.  But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night.  The stroke of the clock even was muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as if generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing, for the use of the living.

Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the window and stood there, looking out across the court?  It was Jacob.  He stood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly round him.  Perhaps there had been an argument.  He looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.

Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell.  Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone with Masham?  Anderson?  Simeon?  Oh, it was Simeon.  The others had all gone.