"I know what it will be like," grunted Boreham, and he hesitated. If May Dashwood had been staying on in Oxford it would have been different, but she was going away. So Boreham hesitated.
"Telephone me this evening, will you?" said Bingham.
"Very well," said Boreham. "I'll see what I have got on hand, and if I have time----" and so the two men parted.
Boreham got into his gig with a heavy heart and drove back to Chartcote. How he hated the avenue that cut him off from the world outside. How he hated the clean smell of the country that came into his windows. How he hated to see the moon, when it glinted at him from between the tops of trees. He longed for streets, for the odour of dirt and of petrol and of stale-cooked food.
The noise of London soothed him, the jostling of men and women; he hungered for it. And yet he did not love those human beings. He knew their weaknesses, their superstitions, their follies, their unreason! Boreham remembered a much over-rated Hebrew (possibly only a mythical figure) who once said to His followers that when they prayed they should say: "Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us."
He got out of his gig slowly. "I don't forgive them," he said, and, unconscious of his own sins, he walked up the steps into his lonely house.
May waited within the gates of the Lodgings for some moments. She did not open the door and enter the house. She walked up and down on the gravelled court. She wanted to be alone, to speak to no one just now; her heart was full of weariness and loneliness.
When she felt certain that Boreham was safely away, she went to the gates and out into the narrow street again, where she could hear subdued sounds of the evening traffic of the city.
The dusky streets had grown less dim; the shining overhead was more luminous as the moon rose.
The old buildings, as she passed them on her solitary walk, looked mysterious and aloof, as if they had been placed there magically for some secret purpose and might vanish before the dawn. This was the ancient Oxford, the Oxford of the past, the Oxford that was about to pass away, leaving priceless memories of learning and romance behind it, something that could never be again quite what it had been. Before dawn would it vanish and something else, still called Oxford, would be standing there in its place?