Boreham's purpose had been thwarted for the moment. But there was still time for him to make another effort, and this time it was to be a successful effort.

A letter to May would have been the easiest way in which to achieve his purpose, but Boreham shrank from leaving to posterity a written proposal of marriage, because there always was just the chance that such a letter might not be answered in the right spirit, and in that case the letter would appear to future readers of Boreham's biography as an unsolicited testimonial in favour of marriage—as an institution. So Boreham decided to continue "feeling" his way!

After all, there was not very much time in which to feel the way, for May was leaving Oxford on Monday. To-day was Friday, and Boreham knew the King's party were going to chapel at Magdalen. If he went, too, it would be possible for him to get May to himself on the way back to the Lodgings (in the dark).

So to Magdalen he went, hurrying along on that Friday afternoon, and the nearer he got to Magdalen the more sure he was that only fools lived in the country; the more convinced he was that Chartcote had become, even in three months, a hateful place.

Boreham was nearly late, he stumbled into the ante-chapel just as they were closing the doors with solemn insistence. He uncovered his head as he entered, and his nostrils were struck with a peculiar odour of stone and mortar; a sense of space around him and height above him; also with the warmth of some indefinable sense of community of purpose that annoyed him. He was, indeed, already warm enough physically with his haste in coming; he was also spiritually in a glow with the consciousness of his own magnanimity and toleration. Here was the enlightened Boreham entering a temple where they repeated "Creeds outworn." Here he was entering it without any exhibition of violent hostility or even of contempt. He was entering it decorously, though not without some speed. He was warm and did not wish to be made warmer.

What he had not anticipated, and what disappointed him, was that from the ante-chapel he could not see whether the Dashwoods were in the Chapel or not. The screen and organ loft were in the way, they blocked his vision, and not having any "permit" for the Chapel, he had to remain in the ante-chapel, and just hope for the best. He seated himself as near to the door as he could, on the end of the back bench, already crowded. There he disposed of his hat and prepared himself to go through with the service.

Boreham did not, of course, follow the prayers or make any responses; he merely uttered a humming noise with the object of showing his mental aloofness, and yet impressing the fact of his presence on the devout around him.

Many a man who has a conscientious objection to prayer, likes to hear himself sing. But Boreham's singing voice was not altogether under his own control. It was as if the machinery that produced song was mislaid somewhere down among his digestive organs and had got rusted, parts of it being actually impaired.

It had been, in his younger days, a source of regret to Boreham that he could never hope to charm the world by song as well as by words. As he grew older that regret faded, and was now negligible.

Is there any religious service in the world more perfect than evensong at Magdalen? Just now, in the twilight of the ante-chapel, a twilight faintly lit above at the spring of the groined roof, the voices of the choir rose and fell in absolute unison, with a thrill of subdued complaint; a complaint uttered by a Hebrew poet dead and gone these many years, a complaint to the God of his fathers, the only true God.

Boreham marked time (slightly out of time) muttering—

loud enough to escape the humiliation of being confounded with those weak-minded strangers who are carried away (in spite of their reason) by the charm of sacerdotal blandishments.

He stood there among the ordinary church-goers, conscious that he was a free spirit. He was happy. At least not so much happy as agreeably excited by the contrast he made with those around him, and excited, too, at what was going to happen in about half an hour. That is, if May Dashwood was actually behind that heavy absurd screen in the Chapel. He went on "tum-ing" as if she was there and all was well.

And within the chapel, in one of those deep embrasures against the walls, was May Dashwood. But she was alone. Lady Dashwood had been too tired to come with her, and Gwendolen had been hurried off to Potten End immediately after lunch, strangely reluctant to go. So May had come to the Chapel alone, and, not knowing that Boreham was in the ante-chapel waiting for her, she had some comfort in the seclusion and remoteness of that sacred place. Not that the tragedy of the world was shut out and forgotten, as it is in those busy market-places where men make money and listen too greedily to the chink of coin to hear any far-off sounds from the plain of Armageddon. May got comfort, not because she had forgotten the tragedy of the world and was soothed by soft sounds, but because that tragedy was remembered in this hour of prayer; because she was listening to the cry of the Hebrew poet, uttered so long ago and echoed now by distressful souls who feel just as he felt the desperate problem of human suffering and the desire for peace.

And then the answer; an answer which to some is meaningless, but which, to the seeker after the "things that are invisible," is the only answer—the answer that the soul makes to itself—

May observed no one in the Chapel; she saw nothing but the written words in the massive Prayer-book on the desk before her; and when at last the service was over, she came out looking neither to right nor left, and was startled to find herself emerging into the fresh air with Boreham by her side, claiming her company back to the Lodgings.

It was just dusk and the moon was rising in the east. Though it could not be seen, its presence was visible in the thin vaporous lightness of the sky. The college buildings stood out dimly, as if seen by a pallid dawn.

"You leave Oxford on Monday?" began Boreham, as they went through the entrance porch out into the High and turned to the right.

"Yes," said May, and a sigh escaped her. That Boreham noticed.

"I don't deny the attractions of Oxford," he said. "All I object to is its pretensions."

"You don't like originality," murmured May.

She was thinking of the slums of London where she worked. What a contrast with this noble street! Why should men be allowed to build dens and hovels for other men to live in? Why should men make ugliness and endure squalor?

"I thought you knew me better," said Boreham, reproachfully, "than to say that."

"If you do approve of originality," said May, "then why not let Oxford work out its own evolution, in its own way?"

"It needs entire reconstruction," said Boreham, stubbornly.

"You would like to pass everything through a mill and turn it out to a pattern," said May. "But that's not the way the world progresses. Entire reconstruction would spoil Oxford. What it wants is what we all want—the pruning of our vices and the development of our virtues. We don't want to be shorn of all that makes up our personality."

Boreham said, "That is a different matter; but why should we argue?"

"To leave Oxford and speak of ourselves, of you and me," said May, persisting. "You don't want to be made like me; but we both want to have the selfishness squeezed out of us. There! I warn you that, having once started, I shall probably go on lamenting like the prophet Jeremiah until I reach the Lodgings! So if you want to escape, do find some pressing engagement. I shan't be offended in the very least."

How she longed for him to go! But was he capable of discovering this even when it was broadly hinted?

Boreham's beard moved irritably. The word "selfish" stung him. There was no such thing as being "unselfish"—one man wanted one thing, another man wanted another—and there you are!

"Human nature is selfish," he retorted. "Saints are selfish. They want to have a good time in the next world. Each man always wants to please himself, only tastes differ."

Boreham spoke in emphatic tones. If May was thinking of her husband, then this piece of truth must be put before her without delay. War widows had the habit of speaking of their husbands as heroes, when all they had done was to have got themselves blown to pieces while they were trying to blow other people to pieces.

"You make questions of taste very important," said May, looking down the misty street. "Some men have a taste for virtue and generosity, and others have taste for vice and meanness."

Boreham looked at her features closely in the dim light.

"Are you angry with me?" he asked.

"Not at all," said May. "We are arguing about words. You object to the use of the word 'selfish,' so I adopt your term 'taste.'"

"There's no reason why we should argue just now," said Boreham. "Not that argument affects friendship! Friendship goes behind all that, doesn't it?" He asked this anxiously.

"I don't expect my friends to agree with me in all points," said May, smiling. "That would be very selfish!" She laughed. "I beg your pardon. I mean that my taste in friends is pretty catholic," and here Boreham detected a sudden coldness in her voice.

"Friendship—I will say more than that—love—has nothing to do with 'points of view,'" he began hastily. "A man may fall in love with a woman as she passes his window, though he may never exchange a word with her. Such things have happened."

"And it is just possible," suggested May, "that a protracted conversation with the lady might have had the effect of destroying the romance."

Here Boreham felt a wave of fear and hope and necessity surge through his whole being. The moment had arrived!

"Not if you were the lady," he said in a convinced tone.

May still gazed down the street, etherealised beyond its usual beauty in this thin pale light.

"I don't think any man, however magnanimous, could stand a woman long if she made protracted lamentations after the manner of Jeremiah," she said.

"You are purposely speaking ill of yourself," said Boreham. "Yet, whatever you do or say makes a man fall in love with you." He was finding words now without having to think.

"I was not aware of it," said May, rather coldly.

"It is true," he persisted. "You are different from other women; you are the only woman I have ever met whom I wanted to marry."

It was out! Not as well put as he would have liked, but it was out. Here was a proposal of marriage by word of mouth. Here was the orthodox woman's definite opportunity. May would see the seriousness of it now.

"As a personal friend of yours," said May, and her tone was not as serious as he had feverishly hoped, "I do not think you are consulting your own interests at this moment, Mr. Boreham."

"No!" began Boreham. "Not mine exclusively——"

"Your remark was hasty—ill considered," she said, interrupting him. "You don't really want to marry. You would find it an irksome bondage, probably dull as well as irksome."

"Not with you!" exclaimed Boreham, and he touched her arm.

May's arm became miraculously hard and unsympathetic.

"Marriage is a great responsibility," she said.

"I have thought that all out," said Boreham. "There may be——"

"Then you know," she replied, "that it means——"

"I have calculated the cost," he said. "I am willing——"

"You have not only to save your own soul but to help some one else to save theirs," she went on. "You have to exercise justice and mercy. You have to forgive every day of your life, and"—she added—"to be forgiven. Wouldn't that bore you?"

Boreham's heart thumped with consternation. It might take months to make her take a reasonable view of marriage. She was more difficult than he had anticipated.

"Marriage is a dreary business," continued May, "unless you go into it with much prayer and fasting—Jeremiah again."

Into Boreham's consternation broke a sudden anger.

"That is why," continued May, "Herod ordered Mariamne to be beheaded, and why the young woman who married the 'beloved disciple' said she couldn't realise her true self and went off with Judas Iscariot." May turned round and looked at him as she spoke.

"I was serious!" burst out Boreham.

"Not more serious than I am," said May; "I am serious enough to treat the subject you have introduced with the fearless criticism you consider right to apply to all important subjects. You ought to approve!"

And yet she smiled just a little at the corners of her mouth, because she knew that, when Boreham demanded the right of every man to criticise fearlessly—what he really had in his mind was the vision of himself, Boreham, criticising fearlessly. He thought of himself, for instance, as trying to shame the British public for saying slimily: "Let's pretend to be monogamous!" He thought of himself calling out pluckily: "Here, you self-satisfied humbugs, I'm going to say straight out—we ain't monogamous——"

He never contemplated May Dashwood coming and saying to him: "And are you not a self-satisfied humbug, pretending that there is no courage, no endurance, no moral effort superior to your own?" It was this that made May smile a little.

"The fact remains," he said, feeling his way hotly, blindly, "that a man can, and does, make a woman happy, if he loves her. All I ask," he went on, "is to be allowed the chance of doing this, and you gibe."

"I don't gibe," said May, "I'm preaching. And, after all, I ought not to preach, because marriage does not concern me—directly. I shall not marry again, Mr. Boreham."

Boreham stared hard at her and his eyebrows worked. All she had just been saying provoked his anger; it disagreed with him, made him dismal, and yet, at least, he had no rival! She hadn't got hold of any so-called saint as a future husband. Middleton hadn't been meddling, nor Bingham, and there was no shadowy third anywhere in town. She was heart free! That was something!

There was the dead husband, of course, but his memory would fade as time went on. "Just now, people who are dead or dying, are in the swim," thought Boreham; "but just wait till the war is over!" He swiftly imagined publishers and editors of journals refusing anything that referred to the war or to any dismal subject connected with it. The British public would have no use for the dead when the war was over. The British public would be occupied with the future; how to make money, how to spend it. Stories about love and hate among the living would be wanted, or pleasant discourses about the consolations of religion and blessed hopes of immortality for those who were making the money and spending it!

Boreham sneered as he thought this, and yet he himself desired intensely that men, and especially women, should forget the dead, and, above all, that May should forget her dead and occupy herself in being a pretty and attractive person of the female sex.

"I will wait," said Boreham, eagerly; "I won't ask you for an answer now."

"Now you know my position, you will not put any question to me!" said May, very quietly.

There came a moment's oppressive silence.

"I may continue to be your friend," he demanded; "you won't punish me?" and his voice was urgent.

"Of course not," she said.

"I may come and see you?" he urged again.

"Any friends of mine may come and see me, if they care to," she said; "but I am very much occupied during the day—and tired in the evenings."

"Sundays?" he interrupted.

"My Sundays I spend with friends in Surrey."

Boreham jerked his head nervously. "I shall be living in Town almost immediately," he said; "I will come and see what times would be convenient."

"I am very stupid when my day's work is done," said May.

"Stupid!" Boreham laughed harshly. "But your work is too hard and most unsuitable. Any woman can attend to babies."

"I flatter myself," said May, "that I can wash a baby without forgetting to dry it."

"Why do you hide yourself?" he exclaimed. "Why do you throw yourself away?" He felt that, with her beside him, he could dictate to the world like a god. "Why don't you organise?"

"Do you mean run about and talk," asked May, "and leave the work to other people? Don't you think that we are beginning to hate people who run about and talk?"

"Because the wrong people do it," said Boreham.

"The people who do it are usually the wrong people," corrected May; "the right people are generally occupied with skilled work—technical or intellectual. That clears the way for the unskilled to run about and talk, and so the world goes round, infinite labour and talent quietly building up the Empire, and idleness talking about it and interrupting it."

Boreham stared at her with petulant admiration. "You could do anything," he said bluntly.

"I shall put an advertisement into the Times," said May. "'A gentlewoman of independent means, unable to do any work properly, but anxious to organise.'"

They had now turned into a narrow lane and were almost at the gates of the Lodgings. May did not want Boreham to come into the Court with her, she wanted to dismiss him now. She had a queer feeling of dislike that he should tread upon the gravel of the Court, and perhaps come actually to the front door of the Lodgings. She stopped and held out her hand.

"I have your promise," he said, "I can come and see you?" He looked thwarted and miserable.

"If you happen to be in town," she said.

"But I mean to live there," he said. This insinuation on her part, that she had not accepted the fact that he was going to live in town, was unsympathetic of her. "I can't stand the loneliness of Chartcote, it has become intolerable."

The word "loneliness" melted May. She knew what loneliness meant. After all, how could he help being the man he was? Was it his fault that he had been born with his share of the Boreham heredity? Was he able to control his irritability, to suppress his exaggerated self-esteem; both of them, perhaps, symptoms of some obscure form of neurosis?

May felt a pang of pity for him. His face showed signs of pain and discontent and restlessness.

"I shall leave Chartcote any day, immediately. London draws me back to it. I can think there. I can't at Chartcote, the atmosphere is sodden at Chartcote, my neighbours are clods."

May looked at him anxiously. "It is dull for you," she said.

Encouraged by this he went on rapidly. "Art, literature is nothing to them. They are centaurs. They ought to eat grass. They don't know a sunset from a swede. They don't know the name of a bird, except game birds; they are ignorant fools, they are damned——" Boreham's breathing was loud and rapid.

"And yet you hate Oxford," murmured May, as she held out her hand. She still did not mean Boreham to come inside the Court, her hand was a dismissal.

"Because Oxford is so smug," said Boreham. "And the country is smug. England is the land that begets effeteness and smuggishness. Yes, I should be pretty desperate," he added, and he held her hand with some pressure—"I should be pretty desperate, only you have promised to let me come and see you."

May withdrew her hand. "As a friend," she said. "Yes, come as a friend."

Boreham gave a curious toss to his head. "I am under your orders," he said, "I obey. You don't wish me to come with you to the door—I obey!"

"Thank you," said May, simply. "And if you are lonely, well, so am I. There are many lonely people in this world just now, and many, many lonely women!" She turned away and left him.

Boreham raced rather than walked away from the Lodgings towards the stables where he had put up his horse. He hardly knew what his thoughts were. He was more strangely moved than he had ever thought he could be. And how solitary he was! What permanent joy is there in the world, after all? There is nothing permanent in life! It takes years to find that out—years—if you are well in health and full of vanity! But you do find it out—at last.

As he went headlong he came suddenly against an obstacle. Somebody caught him by the arm and slowed him down.

"Hullo, Boreham!" said Bingham. "Stop a moment!"

Boreham allowed himself to be fastened upon, and suffered Bingham's arm to rest on his, but he puffed with irritation. He felt like a poet who has been interrupted in a fit of inspiration.

"I thought this was one of your War Office days," he said bluntly.

"It is," replied Bingham, in his sweetest curate tones. "But there is special College business to-day, and I'm putting in an extra day next week instead. Look here, do you want a job of work?"

No, of course, Boreham didn't.

"I'm leaving Chartcote," he said, and was glad to think it was true.

"This week?" asked Bingham.

"No," said Boreham, suddenly wild with indignation, "but any time—next week, perhaps."

"This job will only take four or five days," said Bingham.

"What job?" demanded Boreham.

"There's a small library just been given us by the widow of a General."

"Didn't know soldiers ever read books," said Boreham.

"I don't know if he read them," said Bingham, "but there they are. We want some one to look through them—put aside the sort suitable for hospitals, and make a catalogue raisonnÉ of the others for the camps in Germany."

Boreham wanted to say, "Be damned with your raisonnÉ," but he limited himself to saying: "Can't you get some college chaplain, or some bloke of the sort to do it?"

"All are thick busy," said Bingham—"those that are left."

"It must be a new experience for them," said Boreham.

"There are plenty of new experiences going," said Bingham.

"And you won't deny," said Boreham, smiling the smile of self-righteousness, as he tried to assume a calm bantering tone, "that experience—of life, I mean—is a bit lacking in Oxford?"

"It depends on what you mean," said Bingham, sweetly. "We haven't the experience of making money here. Also Oxford Dons are expected to go about with the motto 'Pereunt et imputantur' written upon our brows (see the sundial in my college), 'The hours pass and we must give an account of them.'"

Bingham always translated his Latin, however simple, for Boreham's benefit. Just now this angered Boreham.

"This motto," continued Bingham, "isn't for ornament but for an example. In short, my dear man, we avoid what I might call, for want of a more comprehensive term, the Pot-house Experience of life."

Boreham threw back his head.

"Well, you'll take the job, will you?" and Bingham released his arm.

"Can't you get one of those elderly ladies who frequent lectures during their lifetime to do the job?"

"We may be reduced to that," said Bingham, "but even they are busy. It's a nice job," he added enticingly.

"I know what it will be like," grunted Boreham, and he hesitated. If May Dashwood had been staying on in Oxford it would have been different, but she was going away. So Boreham hesitated.

"Telephone me this evening, will you?" said Bingham.

"Very well," said Boreham. "I'll see what I have got on hand, and if I have time——" and so the two men parted.

Boreham got into his gig with a heavy heart and drove back to Chartcote. How he hated the avenue that cut him off from the world outside. How he hated the clean smell of the country that came into his windows. How he hated to see the moon, when it glinted at him from between the tops of trees. He longed for streets, for the odour of dirt and of petrol and of stale-cooked food.

The noise of London soothed him, the jostling of men and women; he hungered for it. And yet he did not love those human beings. He knew their weaknesses, their superstitions, their follies, their unreason! Boreham remembered a much over-rated Hebrew (possibly only a mythical figure) who once said to His followers that when they prayed they should say: "Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us."

He got out of his gig slowly. "I don't forgive them," he said, and, unconscious of his own sins, he walked up the steps into his lonely house.