no one who looked at her could help looking again; and that the nervous
expression natural to a young girl, who realises that she is admired but
that policy and manners forbid her to show any pleasure in the fact, was
entirely absent.

"She is so used to all her advantages that she forgets them," thought
the Master, adding with an inward smile--"but if we forgot them--perhaps
that would be another matter! Yes--she is like her mother--but taller."

For on that day ten years earlier, when Ella Risborough had taken Oxford
by storm, she and Lord Risborough had found time to look in on the
Master for twenty minutes, he and Lord Risborough having been frequent
correspondents on matters of scholarship for some years. And Lady
Risborough had chattered and smiled her way through the Master's lonely
house--he had only just been appointed head of his college and was then
unmarried--leaving a deep impression.

"I must make friends with her," he thought, following Ella Risborough's
daughter with his eyes. "There are some gaps to fill up."

He meant in the circle of his girl protégées. For the Master had a
curious history, well known in Oxford. He had married a cousin of his
own, much younger than himself; and after five years they had separated,
for reasons undeclared. She was now dead, and in his troubled blue eyes
there were buried secrets no one would ever know. But under what
appeared to a stranger to be a harsh, pedantic exterior the Master
carried a very soft heart and an invincible liking for the society of
young women. Oxford about this time was steadily filling with girl
students, who were then a new feature in its life. The Master was a kind
of queer patron saint among them, and to a chosen three or four, an