CHAPTER I.
RELUCTANCE.
I.
Neither life nor the lawn-tennis club was so full at Natterley that the
news of Harry Sterling\'s return had not some importance.
He came back, moreover, to assume a position very different from his
old one. He had left Harrow now, departing in the sweet aroma of a long
score against Eton at Lord\'s, and was to go up to Oxford in October.
Now between a schoolboy and a University man there is a gulf, indicated
unmistakably by the cigarette which adorned Harry\'s mouth as he walked
down the street with a newly acquiescent father, and thoroughly realized
by his old playmates. The young men greeted him as an equal, the boys
grudgingly accepted his superiority, and the girls received him much as
though they had never met him before in their lives and were pressingly in
need of an introduction. These features of his reappearance amused Mrs.
Mortimer; she recollected him as an untidy, shy, pretty boy; but mind,
working on matter, had so transformed him that she was doubtful enough
about him to ask her husband if that were really Harry Sterling.