"With Professors and Heads of Houses swimming about like old fat carp."
She paused again when she got through the archway.
"Tell me, Mr. Craik," she said, "is this the tower you live in? And the gargoyle you told me about? I should so like to see him. He must be charming. That face up there, peering over the roof? Oh yes, I see. How too delightful! My! isn't that quaint? Just think, he looks back on the past, and on the present, and on the town; and it symbolizes--symbolizes--Life, doesn't it?"
"Yes,--perhaps it does," Craik said rather dubiously.
"He hasn't exactly a kind expression," said Miss Lamb, looking up again.
"No," Craik answered, looking up himself and laughing. "That's his way. Then to-day he's shocked at seeing so many ladies here. He doesn't like ladies, you know."
"How horrid of him! Why, what harm can we do here?"
"Harm! Why, Miss Lamb," Craik said with quaint politeness, "your visits are our greatest blessings!"
Craik knew the old garden well, he thought, and he had certainly been in it in all weathers. But to-day it came over him that he had never seen the place before looking so oddly green and shining. Certainly, when he and Ranken had walked there--poor Ranken! Craik smiled a little.
"What are you smiling at?" Miss Lamb asked.
"Smiling?" Craik said in embarrassment. "Why, was I smiling?"
"Certainly you were. It is strange, really it is, how much you are like a friend of mine in America. The way you smile reminds me so much of him. Really it is quite funny, the resemblance. But perhaps you don't like to be told you look like other people?"
"Oh yes, I do." Then he added, after a pause, with desperate and awkward courage, "if they are friends of yours."
Miss Lamb did not seem to notice either his compliment or his blush.
"How odd you should know Mr. Ranken," she said musingly. "I've not seen him lately. Is he as sentimental as ever?"
"Ranken of St. Thomas'! Why, he's not sentimental. It must be someone else."
"He used to be then; I'm sure it is Mr. Ranken of St. Thomas'. I met him last summer at Dieppe. We went on picnics. But, Mr. Craik," she added, laughing, "really this garden is like Paradise! The undergraduates must fancy they have got back into the Garden of Eden."