During the rest of that broken term Dick did little work at history: he had lost heart for Oxford, and was occupied mainly in looking out for employment, scholastic or otherwise. Employment, however, wasn\'t so easy to get. It never is nowadays. And Dick\'s case was peculiar. A certain vague suspicion always attaches to a man who has left the University, or proposes to leave it, without taking his degree. Dick found this disqualification told heavily against him. Everybody at Durham, to be sure, quite understood that Plantagenet was only going down from stress of private circumstances, the father having left his family wholly unprovided for; but elsewhere people looked askance at an applicant for work who could but give his possession of a college Scholarship as his sole credential. The Dons, of course, were more anxious that Plantagenet should stop up, to do credit to the college—he was a safe First in History, and hot favourite for the Lothian—than that he should go away and get paying work elsewhere; and in the end poor Dick began almost to despair of finding any other employment to bring in prompt cash than the hateful one at Chidding-wick, which Maud had so determinedly set her face against.

Nor was it Maud only with whom he had now to contend in that matter of the Assembly Rooms. Mary, too, was against him. As soon as Maud returned to Chiddingwick, she had made it a duty to go straight to Mary and tell her how she felt about Dick\'s horrid proposal. Now, Mary, at the first blush of it, had been so full of admiration for Dick\'s heroic resolve—\'for it was heroic, you know, Maud,\' she said simply, calling her future sister-in-law for the first time by her Christian name—that she forgot at the moment the bare possibility of trying to advise Dick otherwise. But now that Maud suggested the opposite point of view to her, she saw quite clearly that Maud was right; while she herself, less accustomed to facing the facts of life, had been carried away at first sight by a specious piece of unnecessary self-sacrifice. She admired Dick all the same for it, but she recognised none the less that the heroic course was not necessarily the wisest one.

So she wrote to Dick, urging him strongly—not only for his own sake, but for hers and his family\'s—to keep away from Chiddingwick, save in the last extremity. She was quite ready, she declared, if he did come, to stand by every word she had said on the point when he first came to see her; but, still, Maud had convinced her that it was neither to his own interest nor his mother\'s and sisters\' that he should turn back again now upon the upward step he had taken in going up to Oxford. She showed the letter to Maud before sending it off; and as soon as Maud had read it, the two girls, united in their love and devotion for Dick, fell on one another\'s necks, and kissed and cried and sobbed with all their hearts till they were perfectly happy.

All this, however, though very wise in its way, didn\'t make poor Dick\'s path any the smoother to travel. He was at his wits\' end what to do. No door seemed to open for him. But fortunately Maud had commended her cause to Archie Gillespie at parting. Now, Gillespie was a practical man, with more knowledge of the world than Dick or his sweetheart, being, indeed, the son of a well-to-do Glasgow lawyer, whose business he was to join on leaving Oxford. He had discovered, therefore, the importance in this world of the eternal backstairs, as contrasted with the difficulty of effecting an entrance anywhere by the big front door or other recognised channels. So, when Sir Bernard Gillingham, that mighty man at the Foreign Office, came up on his promised visit to his son at Durham, Gillespie took good care to make the best of the occasion by getting an introduction to him from the Born Poet; and being a person of pleasant manners and graceful address, he soon succeeded in producing a most favourable impression on the mind of the diplomatist. Diplomatists are always immensely struck by a man who can speak the truth and yet be courteous. The last they exact as a sine qua non in life, but the first is a novelty to them. After awhile Gillespie mentioned to his new friend the painful case of an undergraduate of his college, Plan-tagenet by name, whose father had lately died under peculiar circumstances, leaving a large family totally unprovided for, and who was consequently obliged to go down without a degree and take what paying work he could find elsewhere immediately.

\'Plantagenet! Let me see—that\'s the fellow that beat Trev for the History Scholarship, isn\'t it?\' Sir Bernard said, musing. \'Can\'t be one of the Sheffield Plantagenets? No—no; for they left a round sum of money, which has never been claimed, and is still in Chancery. Extinct, I believe—extinct. Yet the name\'s uncommon.\'

\'This Plantagenet of ours claims to be something much more exalted than that,\' the Born Poet answered, trying to seem unconcerned: for ever since that little affair of the recitation from Barry Neville\'s Collected Works, his conscience or its substitute had sorely smitten him. \'I believe he wouldn\'t take the other Plantagenets\' money if it came to him by right: he\'s so firmly convinced he\'s a son and heir of the genuine blood royal. He never says so, of course; he\'s much too cute for such folly. But he lets it be seen through a veil of profound reserve he\'s the real Simon Pure of Plantagenets, for all that; and I fancy he considers the Queen herself a mere new-fangled Stuart, whom he probably regards as Queen of Scots only.\'

\'Plantagenet!\' Sir Bernard went on, still in the same musing voice, hardly heeding his son. \'And a specialist in history! One would say the man was cut out for the Pipe-roll or the Record Office.\'

\'He knows more about the history of the Plantagenet period than any man I ever met,\' Gillespie put in, striking while the iron was hot. \'If you should happen to hear of any chance at the Record Office, now, or any department like that, a recommendation from you——\'

Sir Bernard snapped his fingers. \'Too late by fifty years!\' he cried, with a pout of discontent—\'too late by fifty years, at the very least, Mr. Gillespie! The competitive examination system has been the ruin of the country! Why, look at the sort of young men that scrape in somehow nowadays, even into the diplomatic service-some of them, I assure you, with acquired h\'s, which to my mind are almost worse than no Ws at all, they\'re so painfully obtrusive. I mean Trev for the diplomatic service; and in the good old days, before this nonsense cropped up, I should have said to the fellow at the head of the F. O. for the time being: “Look here, I say, Smith or Jones, can\'t you find my eldest boy a good thing off the reel in our line somewhere?” And, by Jove! sir, before the week was out, as safe as houses, I\'d have seen that boy gazetted outright to a paid attachéship at Rio or Copenhagen. But what\'s the case nowadays? Why, ever since this wretched examination fad has come up to spoil all, my boy\'ll have to go in and try his luck, helter-skelter, against all the tinkers and tailors, and soldiers and sailors, and butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers in the United Kingdom. That\'s what examinations have done for us. It\'s simply atrocious!\'

Gillespie, with native tact, poured oil on the troubled waters.

\'There are departments of the public service,\' he said with polite vagueness, \'where birth and position no doubt enable a man to serve the State better than most of us others can serve it; and diplomacy is one of them. But, even judged by that standard, the name of Plantagenet is surely one which has done solid work in its time for the country; for the monarch, as Joseph the Second so profoundly said, is the chief of the Civil Service. As to examinations\'—and he looked at Sir Bernard with a quiet smile—\'men of the world like yourself know perfectly well there are still many posts of a reserved charact............