ve got some supernatural gift of intuition that tells them when you’re a student and when you’re not?”
“Quite!” he said. “That’s just it. That’s just the way they do it!” And he looked at Eugene for a moment with his blurred, veinous eyes, and laughed softly, good-naturedly, a little mockingly. “Curious, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than curious. It’s a miracle!”
But it seemed that he was right. For sometimes the proctors would come into a pub where they were drinking, speak amicably to everyone, and in a moment more go out again, but Morison would grow very quiet while they were there, and lean upon the bar, and look down at his drink until they left. And as they left they would look curiously at both men again, and their eye would pass Eugene swiftly and indifferently, and for a moment fix on Morison with a fishy and suspicious look. When they were gone he would look up again at the grinning bar-tender and, his ruddy face suffused with laughter, say exultantly:
“Oh, priceless! Did you see him when he looked at me?”
“I did,” the man behind the counter said. “He didn’t half know what to make of it, did he? The other gentleman is not a student, is he?”
“No!” Morison fairly shouted, his face crimson, as he pounded on the bar. “That’s just the point! And they don’t know what to make of it when they see me with him! They can’t be sure!” he choked. “They can’t be sure!”
And it was Morison who found the house out on the Ventnor road, took lodgings there himself, and gave Eugene the address.
LXX
In the autumn of that year, Eugene lived about a mile out from town in a house set back from the Ventnor Road. The house was called a “farm”—Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that—but it was really no farm at all. It was a magnificent house of the weathered grey stone they have in that country, as if in the very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick grey of time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down for ever on you—and enriching everything it touches—grass, foliage, brick, ivy, the fresh moist colour of the people’s faces, and old grey stone, with the incomparable weathering of time.
The house was set back off the road at a distance of several hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by means of a road
