“I didn’t know when I arranged for you to stay with them that they would not be able to give you a room to yourself. On the other hand, I don’t see that it is at all a sufficient reason for your leaving now you are there. I told you so when I wrote to you. It is only an excuse to get your own way. You have always been like that; though I should have thought you would hardly have considered it worth while to bring the matter up again after all these months.” I accepted my father’s decision without further protest. As a matter of fact, a kind of listlessness had come upon me, an apathetic indifference to whatever might happen. It was Christmas Eve. A heavy fall of snow had occurred during the night, and on the hard, frozen ground it lay unmelted to the dark border of the sea. All the morning I spent beside the fire reading “Richard Feverel,” but about half-past three I went out for a walk over the golf-links. The snow was several inches deep, but being perfectly hard was not unpleasant for walking. I had slept badly last night, a sleep broken by wretched dreams, and I had a mind to go for a really long walk and tire myself out. In spite of being at home again, in spite of this beautiful, bright, exhilarating weather, in spite of the fact that I would be getting a Christmas-box from Mrs. Carroll to-morrow, and a letter from Katherine, and another from Owen, my spirits were of the gloomiest. Never before had I looked so closely into my own soul, and never before had I found so little there to comfort me. I knew that for months past my mind had been gradually submitted to a poisonous influence that had filtered through my blood, like a vapour from some fever-breeding marsh. Yet certain seeds, I thought, could perhaps only have taken root within me, could perhaps only so quickly have sprung to tall dark flower, because they had found a soil already apt to receive them: and I remembered my father’s suspicions in the past. I thought of a book I had been reading lately――a book written for boys, and all about boys――and I compared myself with its heroes. I compared the gloom that weighed upon me now with the troubles they had experienced, and it seemed to me I must be different, not in degree but in kind, from every boy in that book, from the bad just as much as from the good. I remembered hours, whole days, when I had been like them, like the decent ones I mean, for with the others I had nothing in common――I had never wanted to shirk games; and bullying, gambling, dishonesty, and “pubs,” had no attraction for me. But it was just because there were bits of the book in which I could see a part of myself that I was troubled by the absence of other parts, of so many other feelings that none of these boys shared. I wondered if I were quite abnormal, but how could I ever find out even that; for just as nobody knew what I was, I knew nothing really of anybody else, save what they cared to show me or took no trouble to hide. I was