Chapter 2

_"You'll love me yet! And I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing:
June reaped that bunch of flowers you carry
From seeds of April's sowing."_

Saint Bede's is one of the most ancient of the minor colleges of
Avonsbridge. Its foundress's sweet, pale, suffering face, clad in the
close coif of the time of the wars of the Roses, still smiles over the
fellow's table in hall, and adorns the walls of combination-room. The
building itself has no great architectural beauty except the beauty of
age. Its courts are gray and still, and its grounds small; in fact, it
possesses only the Lodge garden, and a walk between tall trees on the
other side of the Avon, which is crossed by a very curious bridge. The
Lodge itself is so close to the river, that from its windows you may
drop a stone into the dusky, slowly rippling, sluggish water, which
seems quieter and deeper there than at any other college past which it
flows.

Saint Bede's is, as I said, a minor college, rarely numbering more than
fifty gownsmen at a time, and maintaining, both as to sports and
honors, a mild mediocrity. For years it had not sent any first-rate man
either to boat-race, or cricket-ground, or senate-house. Lately,
however, it had boasted one, quite an Admirable Crichton in his way,
who, had his moral equaled his mental qualities, would have carried all
before him. As it was, being discovered in offenses not merely against