watching him with quite as much amusement as interest.
Not that he was stared at. Provincials are too polite for that, and the earnest provincials who attend their Universities are perhaps the politest class in England. But whenever he looked up from his notes he met the glance shy and suddenly withdrawn, now from the left, now from the right, which told him that of the fifty or sixty students before him not one was ignorant of the Great Adventure.
His subject that morning was The Hypergraphical Concatenation of the Major Sensory Criteria and Psycho-hylomorphic Phenomena in their Relation of the Subjective to the Objective Aspects of Reflex Actions—a fascinating theme! And one which, upon any other day, he would have analysed with the mouldy bravura that he had cultivated.
But that morning something flagged. The interest of the class was elsewhere, and Professor Higginson knew only too well where it was! His misfortune or accident was already so much public property that the youths and maidens and the respectful dependants and servitors of the University as well were universally acquainted with it.
