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These people among whom he had come by such strange mischance actually lived and moved here, amid these scenes, and they were as common and as prosy to them as the scenes in his own home in the little enclosure hard by the walls of the university building at Wingohocking.

It was that home and its equipment that seemed strange and incongruous to him now. As he thought about it, he felt that he would experience an actual nervous shock if he should suddenly be plumped down in his own library. Very oddly, as his mind reverted to the subject, his memory recalled with peculiarly vivid distinctness an old and faded dressing-gown in which he used to come to breakfast; and a blue cream-jug with a broken handle, which used to be placed before him at the meal.

It seemed to him that the dressing-gown and the defective jug were as far back in the misty past as such a social condition as that with which he had now been brought into contact would have seemed if he had thought of it a month ago.

As the servants entered, bearing the viands upon large dishes, the Baron made his appearance at the upper end of the room, and a moment later Lady Bors walked slowly in, leaning upon the arm of Miss Baffin.