At Oxford all that day, Mr. Archibald Gillespie, of Durham College, found himself in a very singular position indeed for an undergraduate of such unquestioned and respectable manners. For he was keeping Maud Plantagenet shut up behind a sported oak in her brother\'s rooms, and clandestinely supplying her with lunch, tea and dinner.

This somewhat compromising condition of affairs in the third pair left of Back Quad New Buildings had been brought about by a pure concatenation of accidents. When Maud left Chiddingwick that morning, with nothing in her purse, she had trusted to Dick to supply her with the wherewithal for paying her way back again. But as Dick was not at home when she reached his rooms, she had been compelled to wait in for him till he returned from Chiddingwick. For the same reason she was obviously unable to supply herself with food at a hotel or restaurant. Being a Plan-tagenet, indeed, she would have been far too proud to let Gillespie suspect these facts by overt act or word of hers; but, somehow, he guessed them for himself, and soon found his suspicions confirmed by her very silence.

Now, the scouts, or college servants, have a key of the \'oak,\' and can enter men\'s rooms at any moment without warning beforehand. There was nothing for it, therefore, but for Gillespie to take Dick\'s scout frankly into his confidence; which he did accordingly. Already he had forgotten his eleven o\'clock lecture; Plato\'s \'Bepublic\' had gone to the wall before a pretty face; and now he went outside the door to plot still further treason, and shouted, after the primitive Oxford fashion, for the servant.

\'Look here, Robert,\' he said, as the scout came up, \'there\'s a young lady in deep mourning in Mr. Plantagenet\'s rooms. She\'s Mr. Plantagenet\'s sister, and she\'s come up to see him about this dreadful affair the other day, you understand. But he\'s gone down home for the morning to Chiddingwick—they\'ve crossed on the road—and he mayn\'t perhaps be back again till late in the evening. Now, I can see the young lady\'s got no money about her—she came away hurriedly—and I don\'t like to offer her any. So I\'m going to telegraph to Mr. Plantagenet to come back as soon as he can; but he can\'t be here for some time yet, anyhow. Of course, the young lady must have something to eat; and I want you to help me with it. Tell the porter who she is, and that she\'ll probably have to stop here till Mr. Plantagenet comes back. Under the circumstances, nobody will say anything about it. At lunch-time you must take out something quiet and nice in my name from the kitchen—chicken cutlets, and so forth—and serve it to the young lady in Mr. Plantagenet\'s rooms. When Mr. Plantagenet returns he\'ll see her out of college.\'

As for Robert, standing by obsequious, he grinned from ear to ear at the obvious prospect of a good round tip, and undertook for his part with a very fair grace that the young lady\'s needs should be properly provided for. Your scout is a person of infinite resource, the most servile of his kind; he scents tips from afar, and would sell his soul to earn one.

Even in this age of enlightenment, however, an Oxford college still retains many traits of the medieval monastery from which it sprang; women are banned in it; and \'twould have been as much as Mr. Robert\'s place was worth to serve the unknown young lady in Dick Plantagenet\'s rooms without leave from headquarters. So he made a clean breast of it. Application to the Dean, however, resulted in his obtaining the necessary acquiescence; and Gillespie devoted himself through the rest of that day to making Maud as comfortable as was possible under the circumstances in her brother\'s rooms till Dick\'s return from Chiddingwick.

So charitably was he minded, indeed, that he hardly left her at all except at meal-times. Now, in the course of a long day\'s tête-à-tête two people get to know a wonderful deal of one another, especially if they have mutually sympathetic natures; and before Dick returned that evening to set Maud at liberty, she and Gillespie felt already like old friends together.

Dick didn\'t get back, as it happened, till long after Hall, and then it was too late for Maud to catch a train back that evening. The reason for the delay was simple; Dick hadn\'t received Archie Gillespie\'s telegram till his return from the Rectory. He had stopped there to lunch, at Mrs. Tradescant\'s request, after his interview with Mary; and for Mary\'s sake he thought it best to accept the invitation. So the end of it all was that Dick had to find his sister a bed under the friendly roof of a married Fellow of his college, and that before he took her round there, he, she, and Gillespie had a long chat together about the prospects of the situation.

\'Mr. Gillespie and I have been talking it over all day, Dick,\' Maud said very decidedly; \'and we\'re both of us of opinion—most distinctly of opinion—that you oughtn\'t, as a duty to mother and to us, to do anything that\'ll compel you to take back again the one great forward step you took in coming to Oxford. Mr. Gillespie says rightly, it\'s easy enough to go down, but not by any means so easy, once you\'re there, to climb up again.\'

\'I ought to do whatever makes me earn an immediate income soonest, though, for all your sakes, Maud,\' Dick objected stoutly.

\'Not at all!\' Maud answered with Plantagenet decision, and with wisdom above............