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.

"... Julian the Apostate...." Which of them said that and the other
words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, like
a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flapping
through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. "Julian the