"I am sorry I'm late," said the Warden quietly, and he looked at both his guests. "I have been with Lady Dashwood. I must apologise, Bingham, for her absence. I expect Mrs. Dashwood has already told you that she is not well."

The bow with which the Warden offered his arm to May was one which included more than the mere formal invitation to go down to dinner, it meant a greeting after absence and an acknowledgment that she was acting as his hostess. It was one of those ceremonial bows which men are rarely able to make without looking pompous. He had the reputation, in Oxford, of being one of the very few men who, in his tutorial days, could present men for degrees with academic grace.

"I'm sorry, Bingham," he said; "I have only just returned, or I might have secured a fourth to dinner—yes, even in war time."

May went downstairs, wondering. Wondering how it was that the worst was so soon over, and that, after all, instead of feeling a painful pity for the man whose arm held hers in a light grasp, she felt strangely timorous of him.

She was profoundly thankful for the presence of Bingham, who was following behind, cheerful and chatty, having put aside, apparently, all recollection of the conversation of the evening before. Yes, whatever his secret thoughts might have been, Bingham appeared to have forgotten that there were any moonlight nights in the streets of Oxford. For this, May blessed him.

They entered the long dining-room and, sitting at the Warden's end of the table, formed a bright living space of light and movement. Outside that bright space the room gradually sombred to the dark panelled walls. The Warden, in his high-backed chair, looked the very impersonation of Oxford. This was what struck Bingham as he glanced at his host, and the thought suggested that hater of Oxford, the Warden's relative, Bernard Boreham.

"I have just got your friend Boreham to undertake a job of work," said Bingham. "It'll do him a world of good to have work, a library to catalogue for the use of our prisoners. He wanted to shove off the job to some chaplain. I was to procure the chaplain, just as if all men weren't scarce, even chaplains!"

Composed as the Warden was, he looked at Bingham with something of eager attention on his face, as if relying on him for support and conversation.

"Poor old Boreham, he is a connection of mine by marriage," he said, and as the words fell from his lips, he, in his present sensitive mood, recoiled from them, for they implied that Boreham was not a friend. Why was he posing as one who was too superior to choose Boreham as a friend?

"Talking of chaplains," said Bingham, who knew nothing of what was going on in the Warden's mind, and thought this sudden stop came from dislike of any reference to Boreham—"talking of parsons, why not release all parsons in West End churches for the war?"

A smile came into May's face at the extreme sweetness of Bingham's voice; a warning that he was about to say something biting.

"Release all parsons who have smart congregations," continued Bingham, in honied tones; "parsons with congregations of jolly, well-dressed women, women who enjoy having their naughtiness slanged from the pulpit just as they enjoy having their photographs in the picture papers. Their spiritual necessities would be more than adequately provided for if they were given a dummy priest and a gramophone."

May's smile seemed to stimulate Bingham's imagination.

"To waste on them a real parson with a soul and a rudimentary intellect," he went on, "is like giving a glass of Moselle to an agricultural labourer when he would be happy with a mug of beer. But the Church wastes its energies even in this time of heartbreakings."

"I should like to see you, Bingham," said the Warden, smiling too, and turning his narrow eyes, in his slow deliberate manner, towards his guest, "as chairman to a committee of English bishops, on the Reconstruction of the Church."

"I've no quarrel with our bishops," said Bingham; "I don't want them to extol every new point of view as they pass along. I don't expect them to behave like young men. Nor do I expect them to be like the Absolute, without 'body, parts or passions.' My indictment is not even against that mere drop in the ocean, 'good Christian souls,' but against humanity and human nature!" Bingham looked from one to the other of his listeners. "Until now, the only people we have taken quite seriously are the very well dressed and the—well, the undressed. The two classes overlap continually. But now we've got to take everybody seriously; we are going to have a Democracy. Human nature has got a new tool, and the tool is Democracy. The new tool is to be put into the same foolish old hands, and we shall very soon discover what we shall call 'the sins of Democracy.' What is fundamentally wrong with us is what apparently we can't help: it's that we are ourselves, that we are human beings." Bingham smiled into his plate. "We adopt Christianity, and because we are human beings we make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. We are patronising Democracy, and we shall make it intellectually rigid and morally sloppy too—if we don't take care. Everything we handle becomes intellectually rigid and morally sloppy. And yet we still fancy that, if only we could get hold of the right tools, our hands would do the right work."

"The Reconstruction of Human Nature is what you are demanding," said the Warden.

"Yes, that's what we want," sighed Bingham. "When we have got rid of the Huns, we must begin to think about it."

"If you saw the children I have seen, Mr. Bingham," said May, quietly, "you would want to begin at once, and I think you would be hopeful."

There was on the Warden's face a sudden passionate assent that Bingham detected.

"All men," said Bingham, leaning back in his chair and regarding his two listeners with veiled attention—"all men like to hear a woman say sweet, tender, hopeful things, even if they don't believe them. As for myself, Mrs. Dashwood, I admit that your 'higher optimism' haunts me too at times; at rare times when, for instance, the weather in Oxford is dry and bright and bracing."

If he had for a moment doubted it since the afternoon at the Hardings', Bingham was now sure, as sure as a man can be of what is unconfessed in words, that between this man and woman sitting at the table with him was some secret sensitive interest that was not friendship.

How did this conviction affect Bingham and Bingham's spirits? It certainly did not put a stop to his flow of talk. Rather, he talked the more; he was even more sweetly cynical and amiably scintillating than usual. If his heart was wounded, and he himself was not sure whether it was or not, he hid that heart successfully in a sheath of his own sparks.

A pause came when Robinson put out the light over the carving-table and withdrew with Robinson Junior. The dining-room was silent. Bingham drank some wine, the Warden mused, and May Dashwood sat with her eyes on a glass of water by her, looking at it as if she could see some vision in its transparency. The fire was glowing a deep red in the great stone chimney-piece at the further end of the room. A coal fell forward upon the hearth with a strangely solitary sound. Bingham glanced towards the fire and then round the room, and then at his host, and lastly at May Dashwood.

"I heard a rumour," he said, and he took a sip of his claret, "that your college ghost had made an appearance!"

There came another silence in the room.

"One doesn't know how such rumours come about," continued Bingham; "perhaps you hadn't even heard of this one?" He looked across at May and round at the Warden. Neither of them seemed to be aware that a question was being asked.

"I didn't know King's even claimed a ghost," said Bingham again. "I've heard of the ghost of Shelley in the High," he added, smiling. "A ghost for the tourist who comes to see the Shelley Memorial."

May looked down rather closely at the table.

The Warden moved stiffly. "I don't believe Shelley would want to come," he said. "He always despised his Alma Mater."

"He was a bit of an enfant terrible," said Bingham, "from the tutor's point of view."

May raised her eyes with relief; the Warden had parried the question of the ghost with skill.

"And I don't believe," said the Warden, "that any one returns who has merely roystered within our walls," and he smiled.

Bingham was now looking very attentively at the Warden out of his dark eyes.

"Jeremy Bentham," he said, "seems to have been afraid of ghosts, when he was an undergraduate here. He was afraid of barging against them on dark college staircases. It's a fear I can't grasp. I would much rather come into collision with any ghost than with the Stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, whether the staircase was dark or not."

"If there are ghosts," said the Warden, pensively, "I should expect to see Cranmer, on some wild night, wandering near the places where he endured his passion and his death. Or I should expect to see Laud pacing the streets, amazed at the order and discipline of modern Oxford. If personal attachment could bring a man from the grave," he went on, meeting Bingham's eyes with a smile, "why shouldn't that least ghostly of all scholars, your old master, Jowett—why shouldn't he walk at night when Balliol is asleep?"

"Then there was nothing in the rumour," said Bingham, "that your King's ghost has turned up?"

"The Warden doesn't believe in ghosts," said May, looking across the table eagerly. She remembered how he had stood by the bedside of Gwendolen that night. She recalled the room vividly, the gloom of the room and he alone standing in the light thrown upon him by the lamp. She could recall every tone of his voice as he said: "You thought you saw something. You made a mistake. You saw nothing, you imagined that you saw—there was nothing," and how his voice convinced her, as she stood by the fire and listened. How long ago was that—only three days—it seemed like a month.

"No," said the Warden, "I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't believe that our dead"—and he pronounced the last word reverently—"are such that they can return to us in human form, or through the intervention of some hired medium. But if there are ghosts in Oxford," he went on, and now he turned to Bingham, as if he were answering his question—"if there are ghosts in Oxford they will be the ghosts of those who were, in life, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. I am thinking of those men who lived and died in Oxford, recluses who knew no other world, and of whom the world knew nothing—men who used to flit like shadows from their solitary rooms to the Lecture hall and to High table and to the Common room. Those men were monks in all but name; celibates, solitaries—men to whom the laughter of youth was maddening pain."

May's eyes dropped! What the Warden was saying stabbed her, not merely because of the words he said, but because his voice conveyed the sense of that poignant pain.

"Such men as I speak of," he went on, "Oxford must always have possessed, even in the boisterous days when you fellows of All Souls," he said, addressing Bingham, "used to pull your doors off their hinges to make bonfires in honour of the mallard. There always have been these men, students shy and sensitive, shrinking from the rougher side of the ordinary man, shrinking from ordinary social life; men who are only courageous in their devotion to learning and to truth; men who are lonely with that awful loneliness of those who live in the world of thoughts. I knew one such man myself. Those who believe in ghosts may come upon the shades of these men in the passages and in the cloisters at night, or hiding in the dark recesses of our college windows. Why, I can feel them everywhere—and yet I don't believe in ghosts." The Warden placed his elbows upon the table and rested his chin upon his hands, and looked down at the table-cloth.

May said nothing; she was listening, her face bent but expressive even to her eyebrows.

"Neither do I," said Bingham, in an altered voice. "I don't believe in ghosts, and yet, what do we know of this world? We talk of it glibly. But what do we know of the forces which make up the phantasmagoria that we call the World? What do we know of this vast universe? We perceive something of it by touch, by sight, sound and smell. These are the doors through which its forces penetrate the brain of man. These doors are our way of 'being aware' of life. The psychology of man is in its infancy. And remember"—here Bingham leaned over the table and rested his eyes on May—"it is man studying himself! That makes the difficulty!" Bingham was serious now, and he had slipped from slang into the academic form in which his thoughts really moved.

"And we don't even know whether our ways of perceiving are the only ways," said the Warden.

"Anyhow," said Bingham, turning to him, "the ghosts you 'feel,' and which you and I don't believe in, belong to the old Oxford, the Oxford which is gone."

There came a sudden silence in the long room, and May felt that she ought to make a move. She looked at the Warden.

"That Oxford," continued Bingham, "is gone for ever. It began to go when men hedged it round with red brick, and went to live under red-tiled roofs with wives and children."

"Yes, it has gone," said the Warden. "Must you leave us!" he asked, rising, as May looked at him and made a movement to rise.

Bingham rose to his feet, but he stood with his hand holding the foot of his glass and gazing into its crimson depths.

"Pardon, Middleton! Mrs. Dashwood, one moment," he said, and he raised his glass solemnly till it was almost on a level with his dark face. "Will you pledge me?" he asked. "To the old Oxford that is past and gone!"

The Warden and May were both drinking water. They raised their glasses and touched Bingham's wine which glowed in the light from above, almost suggesting something sacramental. And Bingham himself looked like a smooth, swarthy priest of mediÆval story, half-serious and half-gay, disguised in modern dress.

"To the Oxford of sacred memory," he said.

They drank.

May was thinking deeply and as she was about to place her glass back upon the table, the thought that was struggling for expression came to her. She lifted her glass: "To the Oxford that is to be," she said gently. She glanced first at Bingham, and then her eyes rested for a moment upon the Warden.

Bingham watched her keenly. He could see that at that moment she had no thought of herself. Her thoughts were of Oxford alone, and, Bingham guessed, with the man with whom she identified Oxford.

Bingham hesitated to raise his glass. Was it a flash of jealousy that went through him? A jealousy of the new Oxford and all that it might mean to the two human beings beside him? If it was jealousy it died out as swiftly as it had come.

He raised his glass.

"To the Oxford of the Future," said the Warden.

"Ad multos annos," said Bingham.