Instead of going back to the school, he struck across the meadows to the beach. It had cleared at nightfall, and the stars were shining in a deep blue sky, and a lovely young crescent moon, cloud-clung, hung in the west. Tony walked up the beach alone, thinking, feeling intensely. The silent somber beauty of the night, the great stars, the lazy splash of the little foam-flecked waves upon the sands, the cool frosty dark, appealed to him deeply. He could scarcely have told of what he was thinking: of various things—the day’s events, the celebration, Betty and the violets she had given him, Finch and his hungry eyes, life. The world seemed beautiful to him, but strange and sad.... Years afterward he was to recall that night, and remember that it had marked a definite moment in the process of his coming to himself. At the end of the beach he met Mr. Morris, who was also walking alone. “Hello,” exclaimed the master, “what are you doing here? The conqueror is tired of plaudits, eh?” “What brings _you_, magister?... I wanted to be alone I guess.” “And I,” said Morris, with a smile. “Sometimes a day of excitement reacts on me like this. I need to round it off with a walk by myself. Let’s go back together though, if you have had enough of yourself as I have.” “Quite enough,” said Tony, as he turned with the older man back toward the school. For a while they said nothing, but eventually the master, by tactful questions, led the boy to talk of himself. There followed one of those long quiet conversations that come so rarely, but mean so much to boy and master when they come. When they reached the school all of the lights were out save for a glow at the spot where the bonfire had been. They shook hands and parted at the door of Morris’s study. The schoolmaster, when he was alone, instead of lighting his lamp, stood for a long while before the glowing embers of the fire on his hearth, absorbed in his thoughts. He had had a bad day, a stupid day after the excitement of the game, for there had come upon him one of those unaccountable and unreasonable moods of depression wherein it seemed to him that he was wasting his life in the obscurity of a petty profession, wasting the talents, abilities, ambitions, that in college days had promised a brilliant career. He knew it was but a mood, but he had not been able to shake it off. Other fellows, classmates of his at school and college, had been back, with their good-natured, ill-chosen greetings that drove the iron deeper into his soul: “Old Morris—holding the fort—still on the old camp-ground, eh?” and the like.