“Adam, do look at this photograph of Sybil Anderson. Isn’t it too funny?”

Adam has seen it.

They sit and talk for some time.

“Swithin, you must come and dine with me tonight—please.”

“Adam, I can’t. Gabriel’s giving a party in Balliol. Won’t you be there? Oh no, of course, you don’t know him, do you? He came up last term—such a dear, and so rich. I’m giving some people dinner first at the Crown. I’d ask you to join us, only I don’t honestly think you’d like them. It is a pity. What about tomorrow? Come over to dinner at Thame tomorrow.”

Adam shakes his head. “I’m afraid I shan’t be here,” and goes out.

AN HOUR LATER.

Still alone, Adam is walking down the High Street. It has stopped raining and the lights shine on the wet road. His hand in his pocket fingers the bottle of poison.

There appears again the vision of the African village and the lamenting wives.

St. Mary’s clock strikes seven.

Suddenly Adam’s step quickens as he is struck by an idea.

MR. ERNEST VAUGHAN’S ROOMS.

They stand in the front quadrangle of one of the uglier and less renowned colleges midway between the lavatories and the chapel. The window blind has become stuck halfway up the window so that by day they are shrouded in a twilight as though of the Nether world, and by night Ernest’s light blazes across the quad, revealing interiors of unsurpassed debauchery. Swithin once said that, like Ernest, Ernest’s rooms were a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The walls are devoid of pictures except for a half-finished drawing of Sir Beelzebub calling for his rum, which, pinned there a term ago, has begun to droop at the corners, and, spattered with drink and leant against by innumerable shoulders, has begun to take on much the same patina as the walls. Inscriptions and drawings, ranging from almost inspired caricature to meaningless or obscene scrawlings, attest Ernest’s various stages of drunkenness.