for you, too, you idle young——"
"Steady on, father," interposed Lucius, now quite serious again. "I'm not ashamed of you, you know that quite well—there's nothing to be ashamed of—but I didn't think you could mean it, really. You can't mean it, you know, why it's ridic—it's out of the question."
"Why is it out of the question, sir?" asked Mr. Binney. "Why is it out of the question?"
"Well," said Lucius, "look what a precious pair of fools we shall look."
"You may, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I dare say you will. I can't help your looking anything you please. But I flatter myself there's nothing particularly foolish looking about me, is there? Is there, I say?"
"Oh, no, nothing at all," Lucius made haste to reply, "but I should think there would be if you went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate—something precious foolish. I suppose you mean to take a house there, though, or something, and enter at some small college where they won't worry you."
"I intend to do nothing of the sort, sir," said Mr. Binney. "I shall enter myself at Trinity. It is, I believe, the best college at Cambridge. You chose it yourself. And I have no intention of taking a house. I shall live in the college, and comport myself in the same way as the steady young men with whom I, and you, too, I hope, expect to associate."
"Oh, Lord!" groaned Lucius. "Are we to go about together as steady young men? Well, you can't get into Trinity, you know, that's one comfort. The entrance examination is over and you couldn't pass it if it wasn't."
"Couldn't pass it, sir! You little know either your father's ability or determination. And it is not over. There is another in October, for which I shall present myself."
"You'll have your work cut out for you to get ready for it. I suppose you'll go to school for a term. I should go to Johnson's at Margate if I were you, where you sent me—you see you're just over age for a public school—they'll take you as a parlour-boarder, and I should think you might get the good-conduct prize if you're careful."
"That's right, sir," said Peter bitterly. "Pour scorn on your own father, who has given you all the advantages you ever had. Of course, you're a gentleman. You've been to Eton and you're going to Trinity. Yet you grudge me having my little bit of education, though I pay for both."
"Oh, blow the education, father. Why don't you stew up for London University, and live comfortably at home?"
"Because I choose to 'stew up' for Cambridge University, sir, and let that be an end of the matter. You'll find there will only be one of us there if you're not precious careful, and it won't be you."
Poor Lucius went to bed that night with a heavy heart. He had rowed for one year in the Eton eight, and wore with great satisfaction a flannel coat of light blue. He had hitherto looked forward with pleasure to his career at Cambridge, with the hope of wearing another light blue coat of a slightly different cut and shade of colour in the course of it. Now a dark cloud had arisen to obscure the happy azure of his mental horizon.
"If he's going to be such a fool as to go up," he said to himself as he undressed, "I'm hanged if I will. I'll go to Oxford instead, although all the chaps I know best are going to the other shop, and I shan't like it half as well."
He broached this proposition to his father the next morning at breakfast, hoping all the time that he had given up his intention. But Mr. Binney was more than ever confirmed in it, having spent a happy night in dreams of glorious youthful feats to be laid at the feet of the fair Mrs. Higginbotham; and Lucius's idea was received so badly that he relinquished it at once, and made up his mind ruefully that he should either have to go to Cambridge with his father as his close companion, or not go at all. He went back to Eton the next day with all his pleasure in the coming half spoilt by the dark fate that was hanging over him, his only consolation being the recollection of the difficulty of the Trinity entrance examination, which it had taken him all his time to get through, although his work for the last ten years had led directly up to it.
"Of course he can't do the work by October," he said to himself. "He doesn't know a word of Greek and only about three of Latin."
And this consolation had to suffice him, for he knew his father well enough to realise that if he had made up his mind to do this thing, and it was in him to do it, do it he would. Moreover, on the day he had left Russell Square for Eton he had seen a letter on the hall-table addressed in his father's handwriting to the tutor on whose side he himself was entered at Trinity, and blushed to think of what it contained.
Lucius's tutor, who was the most popular in the college, wrote to say that his own side was full, but that his colleague, Mr. Rimington, still had a few vacancies. So Peter wrote to Mr. Rimington and received a reply requesting him to go up to Cambridge for a personal interview.
Peter travelled to Cambridge the same evening and put up at the "Bull." After dinner he went out to make his first acquaintance with a University town. It was a lovely April evening. The deep violet of the twilight sky revealed the irregular roofs and towers of the old buildings. There was a half foreign air about the clean paved streets with the open rivulets running along the pavements. Peter walked up King's Parade and viewed with awe the pile of the famous chapel of King's, past the University Library and the Senate House, and the modern pretentious façade of Caius College, conceived and executed in the best Insurance office style of architecture, and into the narrow, noisy little Trinity Street. The streets were full of men in caps and gowns, and a few still in flannels and straw hats. Mr. Binney wondered how these latter could walk along so unconcernedly when they might at any corner run straight into the arms of a perambulating Proctor. He was so imbued with the idea of himself as a budding undergraduate that he half expected to be taken for one, and felt quite nervous when he did meet a Proctor a little later on, lest he should be asked for his name and college. He was a little disappointed when that functionary passed him without comment, but so reverential were his feelings towards one who held such high office in the University that he could not refrain from taking off his hat to him, a salute which the Proctor gravely returned, much to Mr. Binney's gratification. He would perhaps have been less gratified if he had known that the great man, who was not accustomed to receiving respectful greetings from middle-aged gentlemen, took him for a subservient tradesman whose face he happened to have forgotten.
When Mr. Binney turned into the open space in front of Trinity College and passed through the noble gateway into the Great Court, his heart swelled with pride as he stood and looked round him. The twilight had deepened into night, and the court lay quiet and spacious under the stars. Opposite to him stood the hall, its painted windows shining brightly through the dusk. To its right lay the Master's lodge, which Mr. Binney had been told was also a royal palace, and in front of it plashed the fountain underneath its graceful canopy of stone. To his right was the dark mass of the closed chapel, and all round the court stretched the long low buildings with their lighted windows and busy staircases, their modest regularity broken up by the three gate towers, the hall, the lodge, and the chapel. A little group of chatty dons came towards him from the combination room, across the sacred grass, one of them in all the bravery of a scarlet gown, and passed out through the gate. A porter touched his hat to them and Mr. Binney felt that he could have done the same with pleasure. Towards the undergraduates who went to and fro in the court, along the flagged pathways, his feelings were less reverential, but more curious, for he hoped some day to be one of them. What a proud thing it would be to walk on these very stones in a square cap and a blue gown and feel that one had a share in all the ancient surrounding glories. He walked slowly across the court, and up the steps of the hall. He stopped to read the college notices in the glass-covered cases which hang in the passage between the kitchen and buttery hatches on the one side, and the carved screen which gives access to the hall itself, through heavy swing doors, on the other. A crowd of waiters
