Constance, in the hands of Colonel King and his wife, was well cared for, and the shrewd and rather suspicious soldier would certainly have looked askance on the devotion of a man around thirty, without fortune or family, to a creature so attractive and so desirable as Constance Bledlow.
So he had held aloof, and as Constance resentfully remembered she had received but two letters from him since her father's death.

Ewen Hooper, with whom he had an academic rather than a social acquaintance, had kept him generally informed about her, and he knew that she was expected in Oxford.

But again he did not mean to put himself forward, or to remind her unnecessarily of his friendship with her parents.

At the Vice-Chancellor's party, indeed, an old habit of looking after her had seized him again, and he had not been able to resist it.

But it was her long disappearance with Falloden, her heightened colour, and preoccupied manner when they parted at the college gate, together with the incident at the boat-races of which he had been a witness, which had suddenly developed a new and fighting resolve in him.