'Oh, you mustn't think of me when the time comes,' said Mrs. Elsmere,
sighing. 'I shall be a tiresome old woman, and you will be a young
man a wife. There, put it out of your head, Robert. I thought I
had better tell you, for, after all, the fact may concern your
Oxford life. But you've got a long time yet before you need begin
to worry about it.'

The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his tumbling
reddish hair back from his eyes. He was nearly six feet already,
with a long, thin body and head which amply justified his school
nickname of 'the darning-needle.'

'Don't you trouble either, mother,' he said, with a tone of decision;
I don't feel as if I should ever take Orders.'

Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to attach to
the trenchancy of eighteen, but still the words were pleasant to
her.

The next day Robert went up for examination, and after three days
of hard work, and phases of alternate hope and depression, in which
mother and son excited one another to no useful purpose, there came
the anxious crowding round the college gate in the November twilight,
and the sudden flight of dispersing messengers bearing the news
over Oxford. The scholarship had been won by a precocious Etonian
with an extraordinary talent for 'stems' and all that appertaineth
thereto. But the exhibition fell to Robert, and mother and son
were well content.

The boy was eager to come into residence at once, though he would