Chapter TWO: I

One dark dusk in November that was full of wind and fine rain Speed stood up at his drawing-room window to pull down the blind. But before doing so he gazed out at the dreary twilight and saw the bare trees black and terrible beyond the quadrangle and the winking lights of Milner's across the way. He had seen all of it so many times before, had lived amongst it, so it now seemed to him, for ages; yet to-night there was something in it that he had never seen before: a sort of sadness that was abroad in the world. He heard the wind screaming through the sodden trees and the branches creaking, the rain drops splashing on the ivy underneath the window: it seemed to him that Millstead was full that night of beautiful sorrow, and that it came over the dark quadrangle to him with open arms, drenching all Lavery's in wild and forlorn pathos.

He let the blind fall gently in front of his rapt eyes while the yellow lamplight took on a richer, serener tinge. Those few weeks of occupation had made the room quite different; its walls were now crowded with prints and etchings; there was a sideboard, dull-glowing and huge for the size of the room, on which silver and pewter and cut glass glinted in tranquillity. Across one corner a baby-grand piano sprawled its sleek body like a drowsily basking sea-lion, and opposite, in the wall at right angles to the window, a large fire lulled itself into red contentment with flames that had hardly breath for an instant's flicker. But Speed left the window and stirred the coals into yellow riot that lit his face with tingling, delicious half-tones. In the firelight he seemed very tall and young-looking, with dark-brown, straggling hair, brown, eager eyes that were almost black, and a queer, sad-lipped mouth that looked for the present as if it would laugh and cry in the same way. A leather-seated stool stood by the fireside, and he dragged it in front of the open flames and sat with his chin resting solemnly on his slim, long-fingered hands.

It was a Wednesday and Helen had gone with her mother to visit some friends in the town and would not be back until, perhaps, dinner-time. It was almost four o'clock, and that hour, or at any rate, a few seconds or minutes afterwards, three youngsters would be coming to tea. Their names were Felling, Fyfield, and Graham. All were Juniors, as it happened, and they would be frightfully nervous, and assuredly would not know when to depart.

Speed, liking them well enough, but feeling morbid for some reason or other, pictured them plastering their hair down and scrambling into their Sunday jackets in readiness for the ordeal. Poor little kids! he thought, and he almost longed to rush into the cold dormitories where they were preparing themselves and say: "Look here, Felling, Fyfield and Graham--you needn't come to tea with me this afternoon--you're excused!"

The hour of four boomed into the wind and rain outside. Speed looked round to see if Burton had set the correct number of cups, saucers and plates, and had obtained a sufficient quantity of cake and fancy pastry from the tuck-shop. After all, he ought to offer them some compensation for having to come to tea with him.

Tap at the door. "Come in.... Ah, that you, Felling ... and you, Graham.... I expect Fyfield will be here in a minute.... Sit down, will you? ... Take that easy-chair, Felling.... Isn't it depressing weather? ... I suppose you saw the game against Oversham? That last try of Marshall's was a particularly fine one, I thought.... Come in.... Ah, here you are, Fyfield: now we can get busy with the tea, can't we? ... How's the Junior Debating Society going, Fyfield?" (Fyfield was secretary of it.) "I must come round to one of your meetings, if you'll promise to do exactly as you would if I weren't there.... Come in.... You might bring me some more hot water, Burton.... By the way, Graham, congratulations on last Saturday's match: I didn't see it, but I'm told you did rather well."

And so on. They were nice boys, all three of them, but they were nervous. They answered in monosyllables or else embarked upon tortuous sentences which became finally embedded in meringues and chocolate _éclairs_. Felling, in particular, was overawed, for he was a new boy that term and had only just emerged from six weeks in the sanatorium with whooping-cough. Virtually, this was his first week at school.

In the midst of the ponderously jocular, artificially sustained conversation a knock came on the door. Speed shouted out "Come in," as usual. The door opened and somebody came in. Speed could not see who it was. He thought it must be a boy and turned back the red lampshade so that the rays, nakedly yellow, glanced upwards. Then he saw.

Clare!

II

She was dressed in a long flowing mackintosh which had something in it reminiscent still of the swirl of wind and rain. She came forward very simply, held out her hand to Speed, and said: "How are you, Mr. Speed? I thought perhaps I should find Helen in."

He said, overmastering his astonishment: "Helen's out somewhere with Mrs. Ervine.... I'm quite well. How--how are you?"

"Quite as well as you are," she said, laughing. "Tell Helen I'll call round some other time, then, will you?--I mustn't interrupt your tea-party."

That made him say: "Indeed you're not doing that at all. Won't you stay and have a cup of tea? Surely you won't go back into the rain so soon! Let me introduce you--this is Felling ... Miss Harrington ... and this is Fyfield ... and Graham...."

What on earth had made him do that? He wondered, as he saw the boys shaking hands with her so stiffly and nervously; what was possessing him? Yet, accepting his invitation calmly and decisively, she sat down in the midst of them as soon as she had taken off her wet mackintosh, and appeared perfectly comfortable and at home. Speed busied himself in obtaining a cup of tea for her, and by the time he had at last succeeded he heard her talking in the most amazing way to Graham, and, which was more, Graham was answering her as if they had known each other for weeks. She had somehow found out that Graham's home was in Perth, and they were indulging in an eager, if rather vacuous, exchange of "Do--you--know's." Then quite suddenly she was managing to include Fyfield in the conversation, and in a little while after that Felling demonstrated both his present cordiality and his former absent-mindedness by calling her "Mrs. Speed." She said, with perfect calmness and without so much as the faintest suggestion in her voice of any but the mere literal meaning of her words: "I'm not Mrs. Speed; I'm Miss Harrington."

Speed had hardly anything to do with the talk at all. He kept supplying the participators with fuel in the way of cakes and _éclairs_, but he was content to leave the rest of the management in Clare's hands. She paid little attention to him, reserving most of her conversation for the three boys. The chatter developed into a gossip that was easy, yet perfectly respectful; Speed, putting in his word or two occasionally, was astonished at the miracle that was being performed under his eyes. Who could have believed that Felling, Fyfield and Graham could ever be induced to talk like that in their housemaster's drawing-room? Of course, a man couldn't do it at all, he thought, in self-defence: it was a woman's miracle entirely.

The school-clock began the chime of five, and five was the hour when it was generally considered that housemasterly teas were due to finish. Speed waited till ten minutes past and then interjected during a pause In the conversation: "Well, I'm sorry you can't stay any longer...."

The three boys rose, thankful for the hint although the affair had turned out to be not quite such an ordeal as they had expected. After hand-shaking with Clare they backed awkwardly out of the room followed by Speed's brisk "Good-night."

When they had gone Clare cried, laughing: "Oh, fancy getting rid of them like that, Mr. Speed!--I should be insulted if you tried it on with me."

Speed said: "It's the best way with boys, Miss Harrington. They don't like to say they must go themselves, and they'd feel hurt if you told them to go outright. Really they're immensely grateful for a plain hint."

Now that he was alone in the room with her he began to feel nervous in a very peculiar and exciting way; as if something unimaginably strange were surely going to happen. Outside, the wind and rain seemed suddenly to grow loud, louder, terrifically loud; a strong whiff of air came down the chimney and blew smoke into the room. All around, everywhere, there were noises, clumping of feet on the floor above, chatter and shouting in the corridors, the distant jangle of pianos in the practice-rooms; and yet, in a deep significant sense, it was as if he and Clare were quite alone amidst the wind and rain. He poked the fire with a gesture that was almost irritable; the flames prodded into the red-tinted gloom and revealed Clare perfectly serene and imperturbable. Evidently nothing was going to happen at all. He looked at her with keen quickness, thinking amazedly: And, by the way, what _could_ have happened?

"How is Helen?" she asked.

He answered: "Oh, she's quite well. Very well, in fact."

"And I suppose you are, also."

"I look it, don't I?"

She said, after a pause: "And quite happy, of course."

He started, kicked the fender with a clatter that, for the moment, frightened him, and exclaimed: "Happy! Did you mean am _I_ happy?"

"Yes."

He did not answer immediately. He gave the question careful and scrupulous weighing-up. He thought deliberately and calculatingly of Helen, pictured her in his mind, saw her sitting opposite to him in the chair where Felling had sat, saw her and her hair lit with the glow of the fire, her blue eyes sparkling; then, for a while, he listened to her, heard her rich, sombre whisper piercing the gloom; lastly, as if sight and hearing were not evidence enough, he brought her close to him, so that his hands could touch her. He said then, with deep certainty: "Yes, I'm happy."

"That's fine," she replied. "Now tell me how you're getting on with Lavery's?"

He chatted to her for a while about the House, communicating to her something of his enthusiasm but not touching upon any of his difficulties. Then he asked her what she had been doing in France. She replied: "Combining business with pleasure."

"How?"

"Well, you see, first of all I bought back from my father's publishers all transcription rights. (They'd never used them themselves). Then, with the help of a French friend, I translated one or two of the Helping-Hand-Books into French and placed them with a Paris agent. Business you see. He disposed of them fairly, advantageously, and on part of the proceeds I treated myself to a holiday. I had an excellent time. Now I've come back to Millstead to translate a few more of my father's books."

"But you're continuing to run the shop, I suppose?"

"I've brought over my French friend to do that for me. She's a clever girl with plenty of brains and no money. She speaks English perfectly. In the daytime she'll do most of the shop-work for me and she'll always be handy to help me with translations. You must meet her--you'll find her most outrageously un-English."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that she's not sentimental."

By the time that he had digested that a tap came at the door.

"That's Helen!" said Speed, joyously, recognising the quiet double rap. He felt delightfully eager to see the meeting of the two friends. Helen entered. Clare rose. Speed cried, like an excited youngster: "Helen, we've got a visitor. Who do you think it is?"

Helen replied, puzzled: "I don't know. Tell me."

"Clare!" he cried, with boisterous enthusiasm. "It's Clare!"

Then he remembered that he had never called her Clare before; always it had been Miss Harrington. And yet the name had come so easily and effortlessly to his tongue!

Helen gasped: "Clare! Is it you, Clare?"

And Clare advanced through the shadows and kissed Helen very simply and quietly. Again Speed felt that strange, presaging emotion of something about to happen, of some train being laid for the future. The rain was now a torrent, and the wind a great gale shrieking across the fenlands.

Helen said: "I'm drenched with rain--let me take my coat off." After a short pause she added: "Why didn't you let me know you were coming, Clare? If you had I could have stayed in for you."

III

Speed was always inclined to drop out of conversations that were proceeding well enough without him. In a few moments Helen and Clare were chatting together exactly as if he had not been present. He did not mind; he was rather glad, in fact, because it relieved him from the task of mastering his nervousness. He felt too, what he always felt when Helen was talking to another woman; a feeling that women as a sex were hostile to men, and that when they were together there was a sort of secret freemasonry between them which enforced a rigid and almost contemptuous attitude towards the other sex. Nothing in Clare's manner encouraged this belief, but Helen's side of the conversation was a distinct suggestion of it. Not that anything said or discussed was inimical to him; merely that whenever the conversation came near to a point at which he might naturally have begun to take part in it, Helen seemed somehow to get hold of it by the neck and pull it out of his reach. And Clare was quite impassive, allowing Helen to do just what she liked. These were Speed's perhaps exaggerated impressions as he sat very uncomfortably in the armchair, almost frightened to move lest movement on his part might be wrongly interpreted as irritation, fear, or boredom. When he felt uncomfortable his discomfort was always added to by a usually groundless fear that other people were noticing it and speculating as to its reason.

At six the bell rang for school tea in the dining-hall, and this was his week to superintend that function. Most mercifully then he was permitted to leave the red-glowing drawing-room and scamper across the rain-swept quadrangle. "Sorry I must leave you," he said, hastily, rising from his chair. Helen said, as if her confirmation were essential before his words could be believed: "It's his week for reading grace, you know."

"And after that I've got some youngsters with piano-lessons," he said, snatching up his gown and, in his nervousness, putting it on wrong side out. "So I'll say good-bye, Miss Harrington."

He shook hands with her and escaped into the cold rain. It was over a hundred yards to the dining-hall, and with the rain slanting down in torrential gusts he was almost drenched during the few seconds' run. Somehow, the bare, bleak dining-hall, draughty and fireless and lit with flaring gas-jets, seemed to him exhilaratingly cheerful as he gazed down upon it from the Master's rostrum at the end. He leaned his arms over the edge of the lectern, watching the boys as they streamed in noisily, with muddy boots and turned-up collars and wet ruddy cheeks. The long tables, loaded with smeared jam-pots and towers of bread-slices and tins of fruit jaggedly opened, seemed, in their teeming, careless ugliness, immensely real and joyous: there was a simplicity too, an almost mathematical simplicity, in the photographs of all the rugger fifteens and cricket and hockey elevens that adorned the green-distempered walls. The photographs were complete for the last thirty-eight years; therefore there would be four hundred and eighteen plus four hundred and eighteen plus five hundred and seventy separate faces upon the walls. Total: one thousand four hundred and six.... Speed never thought of it except when he stood on the rostrum waiting to read grace, and as he was not good at mental arithmetic he always had a misgiving that he had calculated wrongly, and so would go over it again multiplying with his brain while his eyes were on the clock. And this evening his mind, once enslaved by the numerical fascination of the photographs, obtained no release until a stamping of feet at the far end of the hall awakened him to the realisation that it was time he said grace. He had been dreaming. Silly of him to stand there on the rostrum openly and obviously dreaming before the eyes of all Millstead! He blushed slightly, smiled more slightly still, and gave the knob of the hand-bell a vigorous punch. Clatter of forms and shuffling of feet as all Millstead rose.... "For these and all His mercies the Lord's name we praise...." About the utterance of the word "mercies," conversation, prohibited before grace, began to murmur from one end of the room to the other; the final "praise," hardly audible even to Speed himself, was engulfed in a mighty swelling of hundreds of unleashed voices, clumping of feet, clattering of forms, banging of plates, shrill appeals for one thing and another, and general pandemonium amidst which, Speed, picking his way amongst the groups of servants, made his escape.

How strange was Millstead to-night, he thought, as he made his way along the covered cloisters to the music-rooms. The rain had slackened somewhat, but the wind was still high and shrieking; the floor of the cloisters, wet from hundreds of muddy boots, shone greasily in the rays of the wind-blown lamps. Over the darkness of the quadrangle he could see Lavery's rising like a tall cliff at the other side of an ocean; and the dull red square that was the window of his own drawing-room. Had Clare gone?--Clare! It was unfortunate, perhaps, that he had called her Clare in his excitement; unfortunate because she might think he had done it deliberately with a view to deepening the nature of their friendship. That was his only reason for thinking it unfortunate.

Down in the dark vaults beneath the Big Hall, wherein the piano-rooms were situated, he found Porritt Secundus waiting for him. Porritt was in Lavery's, and therefore Speed was more than ordinarily interested in him.

"Do you have to miss your tea in order to have a lesson at this hour?" Speed asked, putting his hand in a friendly way on Porritt's shoulder, as he guided him through the gloomy corridor into the single room where a small light was showing.

Porritt replied: "I didn't to-day, sir. Smallwood asked me to tea with him."

Speed's hand dropped from Porritt's shoulder as if it had been shot away. His imagination, fanned into sudden perceptivity, detected in the boy's voice a touch of--of what? Impertinence? Hardly, and yet surely a boy could be impertinent without saying anything that was in itself impertinent.... Porritt had been to tea with Smallwood. And Smallwood was Speed's inveterate enemy, as the latter well knew. Was it possible that Smallwood was adopting a methodical policy of setting the Juniors against him? Possibilities invaded Speed's mind in a scorching torrent. Moments afterwards, when he had regained composure, it occurred to him that it was the habit of prefects to invite their Juniors to tea occasionally, and that it was perfectly natural that Porritt, so recently the guest of the Olympian Smallwood, should be eager to tell people about it.

IV

That night, sitting by the fire before bedtime, Helen said: "Was Clare here a long time before I came in?"

Speed answered: "Not very long. She came while I was having three Juniors to tea, and they stayed until after five.... After they'd gone she told me about her holiday in France."

"She's been bargaining over her father's books in Paris, so she says."

"Well, not exactly that. You see, Mr. Harrington's publishers never arranged for his books to be translated, so she bought the rights off them so as to be able to arrange it herself."

"I think it's rather mean to go haggling about that sort of thing after the man's dead, don't you? After all, if he'd wanted them to be translated, surely he'd have done it himself while he was alive--don't you think so? Clare seems to be out to make as much money as she can without any thought about what would have been her father's wishes."

"I confess," replied Speed, slowly, "that it never struck me in that light. Harrington had about as much business in him as a two-year-old, and if he let himself be swindled right and left, surely that's no reason why his daughter should continue in the same way. Besides, she hasn't much money and it couldn't have been her father's wish that she should neglect chances of getting some."

"She has the shop."

"It can't be very profitable."

"I daresay it won't allow her to take holidays abroad, but that's not to say it won't give her a decent living."

"Of course," said Speed, mildly, "I really don't know anything about her private affairs. You may be right in everything you say.... It's nearly eleven. Shall we go to bed?"

"Soon," she said, broodingly, gazing into the fire. She was silent for a moment and then said, slowly and deliberately: "Kenneth."

"Yes, Helen?"

"Do you know--I--I--I don't think I--I quite like Clare--as much as I used to."

"You don't, Helen? Why not?"

"I don't know why not. But it's true.... She--she makes me feel frightened--somehow. I hope she doesn't come here often. I--I don't think I shall ask her to. Do you--do you mind?"

"Mind, Helen? Why should I mind? If she frightens you she certainly shan't come again." He added, with a fierceness which, somehow, did not strike him as absurd: "I won't let her. Helen--_dear_ Helen, you're unhappy about something--tell me all about it!"

She cried vehemently: "Nothing--nothing--nothing!--Kenneth, I want to learn things--will you teach me?--I'm a ridiculously ignorant person, Kenneth, and some day I shall make you feel ashamed of me if I don't learn a few things more. _Will_ you teach me?"

"My darling. I'll teach you everything in the world. What shall we begin with?"

"Geography. I was looking through some of the exercise-books you had to mark. Do you know, I don't know anything about exports and imports?"

"Neither did I until I had them to teach."

"And you'll teach me?"

"Yes. I'll teach you anything you want to learn. But I don't think we'll have our first lesson until to-morrow. Bedtime now, Helen."

She flung her arms round his neck passionately, offered her lips to his almost with abandonment, and cried, in the low, thrilling voice that seemed so full of unspoken dreads and secrecies: "Oh, Kenneth--Kenneth--you _do_ love me, don't you? You aren't tired of me? You aren't even a little bit dissatisfied, are you?"

He took her in his arms and kissed her more passionately than he had ever done before. It seemed to him then that he did love her, more deeply than anybody had loved anybody else since the world began, and that, so far from his being the least bit dissatisfied with her, she was still guiding him into fresh avenues of unexplored delight. She was the loveliest and most delicate thing in the world.

V

The great event of the winter term was the concert in aid of the local hospitals. It had taken place so many years in succession that it had become institutional and thoroughly enmeshed in Millstead tradition. It was held during the last week of the term in the Big Hall; the boys paid half-a-crown each for admission (the sum was included in their terminal bills), and outsiders, for whom there was a limited amount of accommodation, five shillings. The sum was artfully designed to exclude shop assistants and such-like from a function which was intended to be, in the strictest sense, exclusive. Millstead, on this solemn annual occasion, arrayed itself for its own pleasure and satisfaction; took a look at itself, so to say, in order to reassure itself that another year of social perturbation had mercifully left it entire. And by Millstead is meant, in the first instance, the School. The Masters, for once, discarded their gowns and mortar-boards and appeared in resplendent evening-suits which, in some cases, were not used at all during the rest of the year. Masters, retired and of immense age, rumbled up to the main gateway in funereal four-wheelers and tottered to their seats beneath the curious eyes of an age that knew them not. The wives of non-resident Masters, like deep-sea fishes that rarely come to the surface, blinked their pleased astonishment at finding everything, apparently, different from what they had been led to expect. And certain half-mythical inhabitants of the neighbourhood, doctors and colonels and captains and landed gentry, parked themselves in the few front rows like curious social specimens on exhibition. In every way the winter term concert at Millstead was a great affair, rivalling in splendour even the concentrated festivities of Speech Day.

Speed, in virtue of his position as music-master, found himself involved in the scurry and turmoil of preparation. This concert, he decided, with his customary enthusiasm, should be the best one that Millstead had had for many a year. He would have introduced into it all sorts of innovations had he not found, very soon after he began to try, that mysteriously rigid traditions stood in the way. He was compelled, for instance, to open with the Millstead School Song. Now the Millstead School Song had been likened by a witty though irreverent Master to the funeral-march of a smoked haddock. It began with a ferocious yell of "_Haec olim revocare_" and continued through yards of uneuphonious Latin into a remorseless _clump-clump_ of a chorus. Speed believed that, even supposing the words were sacrosanct, that ought to be no reason for the tune to be so, and suggested to the Head that some reputable modern composer should be commissioned to write one. The Head, of course, would not agree. "The tune, Mr. Speed, has--um, yes--associations. As a newcomer you cannot be expected to feel them, but, believe me, they do--um, yes--they do most certainly exist. An old foundation, Mr. Speed, and if you take away from us our--um--traditions, then you--um--take away that which not enriches you and makes us, urn, yes--poor indeed." And, with a glint of satisfaction at having made use of a quotation rather aptly, the Head indicated that Speed must not depart from the recognised routine.

Even without innovations, however, the concert demanded a great deal of practising and rehearsal, and in this Speed had the rather hazy co-operation of Raggs, the visiting organist. He it was who told Speed exactly what items must, on no account, be omitted; and who further informed him of items which must on no account be included; these latter consisted chiefly of things which Speed suggested himself. It was finally arranged, however, and the programme submitted to and passed by the Head: there was to be a pianoforte solo, a trio for piano, violin and 'cello, a good, resounding song by the choir, a quartet singing Christmas carols, and one or two "suitable" songs from operas. The performers, where possible, were to be boys of the school, but there were precedents for drawing on the services of outsiders when necessary. Thus when it was found that the school orchestra lacked first violins, Raggs gave Speed the names of several ladies and gentlemen in the town who had on former occasions lent their services in this capacity. And among these names was that of Miss Clare Harrington.

Speed, making his preparations about the middle of November, was in a dilemma with this list of names. He knew that, for some reason or other, Helen did not care for Clare's company, and that if Clare were to take part, not only in the concert itself, but in all the preceding rehearsals, she would be brought almost inevitably into frequent contact with Helen. He thought also that if he canvassed all the other people first, Clare might, if she came to hear of it, think that he had treated her spitefully. In the end he solved the difficulty by throwing the burden of selection on to Raggs and undertaking in exchange some vastly more onerous task that Raggs was anxious to get rid of. A few days later Raggs accosted Speed in the cloisters and said: "I've got you a few first violins. Here's their names and addresses on this card. They'll turn up to the next rehearsal if you'll send them word."

When Raggs had shambled away. Speed looted curiously at the card which he had pushed into his hand. Scanning down the list, scribbled in Raggs' most illegible pencilled script, he found himself suddenly conscious of pleasure, slight yet strangely distinct; something that made him go on his way whistling a tune. Clare's name was on the list.

VI

Those crowded winter nights of rehearsals for the concert were full of incident for Speed. As soon as the school had finished preparation in the Big Hall, the piano was uncovered and pushed into the middle of the platform; the violinists and 'cellists began to tune up; the choir assembled with much noise and a disposition to regard rehearsals as a boisterous form of entertainment; lastly, the visitors from the town appeared, adapting themselves condescendingly to the rollicking atmosphere.

Speed discovered Clare to be a rather good violinist. She played quietly and accurately, with an absence (rare in good violinists) of superfluous emotion. Once she said to Speed, referring to one of the other imported violinists: "Listen! This Mozart's only a decorative frieze, and that man's playing it as if it were the whole gateway to the temple of Eros." Speed, who liked architectural similes himself, nodded appreciatively. Clare went on: "I always want to laugh at emotion in the wrong place. Violinists who are too fond of the mute, for instance." Speed said, laughing: "Yes, and organists who are too fond of the _vox humana_." To which Clare added: "And don't forget to mention the audiences that are too fond of both. It's their fault principally."

At ten o'clock, when rehearsals were over, Speed accompanied Clare home to the shop in High Street. There was something in those walks which crept over him like a slow fascination, so that after the first few occasions he found himself sitting at the piano during the rehearsal with everything in his mind subordinate to the tingling anticipation of the stroll afterwards. When they left the Big Hall and descended the steps into the cool dusk of the cloisters, his spirits rose as with wine; and when from the cloisters they turned into the crisp-cold night, crunching softly over the frosted quadrangle and shivering joyously in the first keen lash of the wind, he could have scampered for sheer happiness like a schoolboy granted an unexpected holiday. Sometimes the moon was white on roofs and roadways; sometimes the sky was densely black; sometimes it was raining and Millstead High Street was no more than a vista of pavements with the yellow lamplight shining on the pools in them: once, at least, it was snowing soft, dancing flakes that covered the ground inches deep as they walked. But whatever the world was like on those evenings on which Speed accompanied Clare, one thing was common to them all: an atmosphere of robust companionship, impervious to all things else. The gales that romped and frolicked over the fenlands were no more vigorous and coldly sweet than something that romped and frolicked in Speed's inmost soul.

Once they were discussing the things that they hated most of all. "I hate myself more than anything else--sometimes," said Speed.

Clare said: "And I hate people who think that a thing's bound to be sordid because it's real: people who think a thing's beautiful merely because it's hazy and doesn't mean anything. I'm afraid I hate Mendelssohn."

Speed said: "Mendelssohn? Why, that was what Helen used to be keen on, wasn't it?--last term, don't you remember?"

A curious silence supervened.

Clare said, after a pause: "Yes, I believe it was."

VII

Helen's attitude towards Clare at this time was strangely at variance with her former one. As soon as she learned that Clare was playing in the concert she wrote to her and told her always to come into Lavery's before the rehearsal began. "It will be nice seeing you so often, Clare," she wrote, "and you needn't worry about getting back in the evenings because Kenneth will always see you home."

Speed said, when he heard of Helen's invitation: "But I thought you didn't like Clare, Helen?"

"Oh, I was silly," she answered. "I do like her, really. And besides, we must be hospitable. You'll see her back in the evenings, won't you?"

"I daresay I _can_ do," he said.

Then, suddenly laughing aloud, he caught her into his arms and kissed her. "I'm so glad it's all right again, Helen. I don't like my little Helen to throw away her old friends. It isn't like her. You see how happy we shall all be, now that we're friendly again with Clare."

"I know," she said.

"I believe you are the most lovable and loving little girl in the world except--" he frowned at her playfully--"when the devil persuades you that you don't like people. Some day he'll persuade you that you don't like me."

"He won't," she said.

"I hope he won't."

She seemed to him then more than ever a child, a child whose winsomeness was alloyed with quaint and baffling caprice. He loved her, too, very gladly and affectionately; and he knew then, quite clearly because the phase was past that her announced dislike of Clare had made him love her not quite so much. But now all was happy and unruffled again, so what did it matter?