Dusk was falling as Harry made his way up through the wood and across the park homewards. The air was very still, and the sweet scents of the earth, dissolved in dew, rose like incense. Usually his impressionable untroubled mind would have leapt to the message of his senses, and he would have exulted in the beauty that lay all around him, sublimated by the spell of oncoming night. But as his feet brushed the moisture from the grass, and stirred the cool scents to greet his nostrils, he looked down and not up as his way was. A vague discontent was upon his spirit, which was not quite unhappiness though near akin to it. The vision of a free life in a free untouched land had come to him. For the first time in his happy boyhood he felt himself bound by his lot. The great world, with its endless varieties of adventure and invitation to be doing and living, lay beyond his horizons and he had never crossed them. Melancholy touched him so seldom that it was a discomfort to be resisted. He wondered what made him sad at the thought of being tied to Royd, which had hitherto been a paradise of enjoyment to him. He stood still as he came out from among the trees and looked across the park to the dark mass of the Castle, in which lights were glimmering here and there, making it more romantic and beautiful even than when seen in the day-time. And as he looked, the momentary sadness fell from him, and he smiled with pleasure at the scene so familiar yet always showing itself in some new emanation of beauty. He was coming to the age at which he could no longer be satisfied with it as holding everything in life. The shadow of unrest had just fallen upon him, but it would not be yet that he would walk in it. As he neared the Castle a white figure, dimly seen in the dusk, detached itself from the gloom that lay about the massive walls and came towards him along the trodden path by which he was hastening. He recognized it as that of his mother, who not infrequently came out to meet him like this when he had begged off dinner and came back after it. It usually gave him pleasure to find her waiting for him in this way. There was not, perhaps, very much in common between them, but he knew how much he was to her, and his chivalry went out towards her, in love and a sense of protection.