It was the winter of 1919-20, a year after Peace was proclaimed, and the suburbs had got back their men­—such as had survived—and were sinking back into their old comfortable ways. Motor-cars were possible again, and every little while the walkers were warned by a loud hooting that a car was about to emerge from an entrance gate to take its owners for a Saturday afternoon outing. Warmly clad, healthy children walked beside nurses wheeling perambulators; vans delivered provisions for the week-end; peace and plenty reigned.
    And Jim’s heart failed him. All these villas, smug and prosperous, seemed to lie like a weight on him, holding him down, making certain that he did not escape from  Glasgow to that city of dreaming spires, Oxford.
    It would have been idle to remind him that there was culture in Glasgow, brains of the best, splendid tradi­tions; useless to point out that the suburbs of one city were very like the suburbs of another, that in Oxford, too, on a Saturday afternoon, vans delivered Sunday dinners to roads and roads of villas, nurses wheeled perambulators, and prosperous, busy men took their wives out in serviceable little cars. To Jim, at the moment, Glasgow represented everything in life that was drab and ugly and uninteresting; Oxford lay in rosy mists, a many-towered Camelot.
    Jim was twenty. He had gone to France a month before the Armistice and had been bitterly disappointed not to have got more of a chance, but the training had given him that gravely competent air so familiar to us in the young officers of the War, and made him seem older than his twenty years. He was a fair, clean-looking boy, a purposeful mouth being the most note­worthy thing about him.
    He marched on doggedly for a time, then he looked at his wrist-watch and stopped, waiting till his brothers, who lagged some way behind, made up on him.
    “Look here,” he said, “it’s a rotten day for a walk. Let’s cut through here and go home by the Park.”
    Rob and Geordie, who loathed walking on roads, expressed entire agreement, and once their faces were turned towards home things became pleasanter. Jim’s spirits rose as he told the two boys a chapter of the story which had enlivened many a walk for them, a long, continued tale of three young adventurers, whose names, surprisingly enough, were Jim and Rob and Geordie. For this young man was a born teller of stories and was already using his talent to some purpose, having had about half a dozen accepted by popular magazines.
    As they turned into Pollok Road unconsciously Jim’s steps quickened. The wire from Oxford must have come now: he had given it every chance: probably Eliza would come bounding to meet them waving it in her hand. Rob and Geordie would fain have rushed in first, but some instinct made them hang back and sedately shut the gate before following their brother into the house.
    Jim opened the door and paused. No one came running. Eliza was invisible, but through the half-­open door of the study he could see his mother darning stockings by the fire.
    It hadn’t come.