In the warm June weather young Angleside went up to pass his examination for entrance at Trinity. There is nothing particularly interesting or worthy of note in that simple process, though at that time the custom of imposing an examination had only been recently imported from Oxford. For one whole day forty or fifty young fellows from all parts of the country sat at the long dining-tables in the beautiful old hall and wrote as busily as they could, answering the printed questions before them, and eyeing each other curiously from time to time. The weather was warm and sultry, the trees were all in full leaf and Cambridge was deserted. Only a few hard-reading men, who stayed up during the Long, wandered out with books at the backs of the colleges or strayed slowly through the empty courts, objects of considerable interest to the youths who had come up for the entrance examination--chiefly pale men in rather shabby clothes with old gowns and battered caps, and a general appearance of being the worse for wear.
Angleside had been in Cambridge before and consequently lost no time in returning to Billingsfield when the examination was over. Short was to spend the summer at the vicarage, reading hard until the term began, when he was to go up and compete for a minor scholarship; Angleside was to wait until he heard whether he had passed, and was then going abroad to meet his father and to rest from the extreme exertion of mastering the "Apology" and the first books of the "Memorabilia." John drove over to meet the Honourable Cornelius, who was in a terrible state of anxiety and left him no peace on the way asking him again and again to repeat the answers to the questions which had been proposed, reckoning up the ones he had answered wrong and the ones he thought he might have answered right, and coming each time to a different conclusion, finally lighting a huge brierwood pipe and swearing "that it was a beastly shame to subject human beings to such awful torture." John calmed him by saying he fancied Cornelius had "got through"; for John's words were a species of gospel to Cornelius. By the time they reached the vicarage Angleside felt sanguine of his success.
The vicar was not visible. It was a strange and unheard of thing--there were visitors in the drawing-room. This doubtless accounted for the fact that the fly from the Duke's Head was standing on the opposite side of the road. The two young men went into their study, which was on the ground floor and opened upon the passage which led to the drawing-room from the little hall. Angleside remarked that by leaving the door open they would catch a glimpse of the visitor when he went out. But the visitor stayed long. The curiosity of the two was wrought up to a high pitch; it was many months since there had been a real visitor at the vicarage. Angleside suggested going out and finding old Reynolds--he always knew everything that was going on.