18
Father Ben Costanza found his breath a little short as he walked up the stone steps to his office on the first floor. He stood at the window as his pulse calmed, watching the students lazing on the grass below in the quad of Blackfriars Hall in the heart of Oxford. He smiled a little. They were so young, these students, their faces lit with hope and the possibility of a bright future ahead. He still taught some tutorials in theology, but his mind was often elsewhere these days.
Ben knew the students saw him as another creature, utterly removed and invisible to their worldview, his wrinkled, shrunken old flesh anathema to their young lives.
Had he once looked at his own tutors that same way?
A flash of memory and Ben remembered that one amazing summer when he had fallen in love. As a
