Katherine tried to talk to me, but I answered in monosyllables, and, an hour earlier than I had intended, I got up to say good-night. “We shall see you to-morrow, Peter,” Mrs. Carroll suggested, as I shook hands with her. “What would you like to do to-morrow?” she added, turning to Katherine. Katherine smiled at me as if we were quite old friends. “I want to climb some of the mountains,” she said. “I planned that the minute I saw them.” Again her face awakened in me the memory of another face I had known――but where? when? “In that case you ought to start early,” Mrs. Carroll went on, “and you could take your lunch with you. Peter knows all the different walks for miles round.” I was on the point of declaring that I had an engagement, but I overcame the temptation. I promised to come soon after breakfast, and made my escape. CHAPTER VII I went home in a state of profound depression. I had made a hopeless fool of myself; probably they were talking about it now. These thoughts were rendered no brighter by being mingled with anticipations of what I was returning to. Above all else in the world, perhaps, I hated, and almost feared, that atmosphere of dullness and joylessness, which hung like a mist over our house. It exasperated me, it seemed to sap my vitality, and with all the strength of my nature I tried to resist it. It was as if the narrowness and dinginess, the gray, colourless, melancholy monotony of my father’s existence, had a hateful power of penetrating into my brain, like the fumes of a drug, clouding my mind, subduing it to a kind of cold lethargy: there were times when I had a feeling that I was struggling for life.