Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story

Still, he had a craving for more. Few though his hours were, he hoped the next two would pass quickly. And, though he knew Mr. Druce could be trusted to send the bottle round to his rooms immediately, he preferred to carry it away with him. He slipped it into the breast-pocket of his coat, almost heedless of the slight extrusion it made there. Just as he was about to cross the High again, on his way home, a butcher’s cart dashed down the slope, recklessly driven. He stepped well back on the pavement, and smiled a sardonic smile. He looked to right and to left, carefully gauging the traffic. Some time elapsed before he deemed the road clear enough for transit. Safely across, he encountered a figure that seemed to loom up out of the dim past. Oover! Was it but yesternight that Oover dined with him? With the sensation of a man groping among archives, he began to apologise to the Rhodes Scholar for having left him so abruptly at the Junta. Then, presto!--as though those musty archives were changed to a crisp morning paper agog with terrific head-lines--he remembered the awful resolve of Oover, and of all young Oxford. “Of course,” he asked, with a lightness that hardly hid his dread of the answer, “you have dismissed the notion you were toying with when I left you?” Oover’s face, like his nature, was as sensitive as it was massive, and it instantly expressed his pain at the doubt cast on his high seriousness. “Duke,” he asked, “d’you take me for a skunk?”