"Yes," and he noticed she hesitated before adding quickly, "but you must ask your guardian first." John's heart stopped. The cruelty of it! "I shall do nothing of the kind," he said hotly. "I--I think you're wonderful, Mrs. Graham," he added in boyish admiration, and he noticed she turned her head away. A moment later they had come out of the drive and joined the others. BOOK III GROWTH CHAPTER I I The chronicles of youth, filled with trivial incidents, but acute at the moment of experience, swiftly pass. John found himself, on his seventeenth birthday, hardly aware that he was leaving boyhood behind him. He was very different from the shy sensitive youngster who on that momentous day of his arrival at Sedley had stood miserably on the platform watching with an aching heart the receding train. He had altered, almost incredibly, and yet he had not altered. In the handsome, self-possessed lad, a leader of his house, something of a god to the younger boys, with already a distinguished 'career' behind him, as athlete and scholar, a President of the Literary Society, a leading light in debate, the Editor of the school magazine, Sedley indeed had a creditable specimen of its training. Had Mr. Fletcher, who had watched over him with a father's care, been asked for his most reliable boy, it would have been John that he named, or for his most promising, again, John, despite the dazzling brilliance of the fitful Marsh; and yet Mr. Fletcher knew his weaknesses--the tendency to dream, the sudden sensitiveness that made John seem afraid of life, and occasionally, but rarely now, that strange oriental preoccupation, that came over him, and shut him out from his fellows. There was always something a little mysterious, thought Mr. Fletcher. He loved and knew well all his boys. Even Marsh's fanciful versatility held no secrets from him. But he never quite plumbed the bottom of John's nature. Affectionate, deeply so, revealed in a hundred small acts of tribute, Mrs. Fletcher had drawn out the fires of devotion in the boy's heart, even sometimes, to little whimsical confessions that she knew were signs of his absolute trust. He had talked of his mother often. It was in Mrs. Fletcher's drawing-room, where she had first seen father and son together, that they talked of the reunion, after a parting of three years' duration. She laughed away all John's fears of that meeting, soothed his feverish anticipation. "Oh, Mrs. Fletcher, will father think I've grown?" he would ask. "Why of course,--you're almost a man now." "But do you think I have grown as he would wish?"--half fearfully this, at which Mrs. Fletcher would laugh, "Why you silly boy, are you afraid your father won't be glad to see you?" "Oh,--it's not that--only you know Mrs. Fletcher--he thought so much of me when I was a kid--I'm almost afraid he might be disappointed."