Not only the entire county of ——shire but even the whole University of Cambridge had been thrown into quite a whirl of emotion by the marriage of Henry Waring and Grace Selwyn, the most unexpected ever concocted in heaven or on earth.

A Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of his college, who at twenty-six, eats, drinks, and sleeps mathematics, besides being possessed of other devouring passions for certain of the minor sciences, does not seem a very fit subject for matrimony with its petty follies and cares.

If one is, besides, the son of a cynic and a bookworm, who loathed and eschewed the sex with bitter reason, and whose own practical knowledge had been gained chiefly through the classics and the bedmakers, the one of which appeals but little to one’s sense of propriety, the other still less to one’s fleshly sense, the prospect of a domestic and patriarchal career must seem as remote as it is undesirable.

And yet Henry Waring found himself, to his constant and increasing bewilderment, embarked on one almost before he altogether knew where he was.

The year previous to his marriage he had suffered a good deal from ennui. A favourite theory in geology over which he had peered himself half blind, was suddenly exploded without hope of reconstruction. He felt rather lost and distrait, and cast about for some tangible solid brainwork.

But to pass the time until the fresh inspiration came on, he took to propounding stray problems, and—through the press—launching them broadcast over the land. Strange to say, he got answers, and by the score. A good many more “mute inglorious Solons” infest our villages than we have any notion of.

Mr. Waring groaned in spirit and mourned over the depravity of the race as he read their epistles, and drew farther back than ever into his shell. If the average man and woman without the academical walls resembled these productions, the less one had to do with them the better, he very reasonably reflected.

After this had been going on for the space of three months, he came, one morning, down to breakfast. He felt very sick at heart; his pupils seemed so amazingly full of enthusiasm for minor concerns, and so absolutely lacking in it for the one thing needful, that he was cut to the quick and moved to much gentle wrath. And then these letters! They were fast becoming his Nemesis.

He ate his breakfast and watched with unwonted pleasure some dust motes dancing in a sunbeam, and raising his eyes to follow them, they unconsciously strayed farther out into the college quad, where the dew was still sparkling on every grass blade, and shimmering on every flower.

Mr. Waring felt quite cheerful and revived as he pushed away his plate and cup and began to open his letters. Letter after letter was laid down, a spasm of pain passing each time across his face, and more than once an audible groan escaped him.

At last he picked up a letter gingerly, as he handled all this variety of correspondence—the village mathematician being an unclean beast—but this letter seemed somehow different, he turned it over with growing interest, and even took the pains to examine the postmark, then he opened it and found a quite different production from any he had yet received.

First on opening it a curious indefinite scent struck on his nostrils. He sniffed it up perplexedly; some queer old memories began to stir in him, and he paused a moment to try and classify them, but he could not, so he set himself to examine the contents of the missive.

The answer given to his problem was accurate and the accompanying remarks clear, strong, and to the point, written in a woman’s hand and signed with a woman’s name, “Grace Selwyn”.

That letter was answered before the breakfast things were cleared away, and certain fresh problems enclosed which were not sent in any other direction.

Many letters went and came after that, containing problems and their answers, the answers always full of that strange, vague, delicious scent, which seemed to waft itself through the study and to remain there, caught with the dust motes in the sunbeam.

A longing and a yearning for those little notes began to take possession of Henry Waring and to disturb his mind. Old memories of the time when he wore frocks and toddled, began to haunt him, and his work was no longer done by reflex action.

He consulted a doctor, but as he only confided half his symptoms to that scientific person, quite suppressing the letters, the doctor felt rather out of it and prescribed quinine, which had no effect whatsoever.

One morning the yearning for a letter grew suddenly quite overmastering; and none came. This was the climax. By a sudden impulse which he never succeeded in explaining to himself on any satisfactory grounds, Mr. Waring went to his bedroom, knelt down by his big chest of drawers, and proceeded to pack a little valise with every article he did not want, leaving out all those he did. Then he stepped into a cab and made for the station.

Towards the close of the day he presented himself at the door of a queer old red-brick manor house in Kent owned by a Colonel Selwyn and his wife, and asked simply for “Miss Grace Selwyn”.

In three months from that day the two came down the path hand in hand and stepped out together on life’s journey, and six months later through the death of a cousin, Waring Park fell to them and made up for the loss of the Fellowship.