A long silence followed. If Brocklehurst were surprised by his new friend’s last words, he at least showed nothing. The wind stirred faintly above their heads, and a flock of rooks flew homeward across the grey sky. It was already getting late. The world seemed to have floated into a clinging frosty haze, through which a golden moon gleamed, rising slowly up above the bare, desolate fields. ‘We had better be going back,’ Brocklehurst said. ‘It is getting dark.’ They walked slowly toward the school through the gathering dusk. To feel his companion close beside him, and to be alone with him like this, gave Graham an exquisite pleasure. If only he could be brave enough to put his hand upon his shoulder! All the way home he kept telling himself he would do so when they reached such and such a point in the road; but each time a curious shyness deterred him, each time his courage failed him; and when they at last reached the school, and his opportunity was gone, he felt as if he had allowed something precious and unrecoverable to slip away for ever. IV Graham lay upon his back, his eyes wide open. All around him he could hear the silence――a silence broken every now and again by some faint sound from one or another of the boys who shared his dormitory. It was more than an hour since the lights had been put out, and all save himself were fast asleep; but he lay awake still, thinking of the afternoon that had just passed, and of the strange emotion it had swept into his life. He wondered how it could have come about, and he pondered old tales he had read――some of them long ago――tales of a pagan world, in which this wonderful passion of friendship, then so common, had played its part. Returning to him now, they wore a new and added beauty, a meaning he had only dreamed before, but which at present filled his mind with a kind of heavenly radiance. Might not his own friendship be just the same?... Might not it, too, be something more than a mere romantic reverie, than the shadow of a beautiful dream? He felt an exquisite happiness in giving way to his tenderness, in letting his imagination run on and on, like a swift, strong river, in an ever-changing dream of love. It was as if by merely stretching out his hand he had touched the poetry, the soul of existence; it was as if by stretching out his hand he had awakened another spirit to beat its wings within his own. ‘Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon.’