So Sir Charles Evrard was not the author of my prosperity! The disappointment of the discovery robbed me for an instant of all sense of gratitude. I felt almost angry with the Creature for having been the innocent cause of all this building of air-castles. This was the second time that fortune had led me on to expect, only to trick me when the future seemed secure. The uncertainty of everything unnerved me. Life seemed to pucker its brows and stare down at me with a frown. All the money that had been spent on my education had taught me nothing immediately useful--and now I had a living to earn. Luckily, just about this time, it was suggested to me that, after I had taken my Finals, I should enter for some of the history fellowships in the autumn. It was expected that I would gain an easy First; if I did that, I had a fair chance of winning a fellowship at my own college. Now that my fool’s paradise had melted into nothingness, I felt the spur of necessity, and commenced to work strenuously. Gradually a higher motive than the mere hope of reward began to actuate my energy. I wanted to be what the Creature had hoped for me. Now that he was gone, he became very near to me. He was always haunting my memory. He had robbed himself that he might give me my chance. I felt humbled that I should have spent his money with so free a hand, while he had been living in comparative poverty. I could picture just how he looked that morning when the boys burst into the laboratory. His hands were stained with chalk. His uncombed hair fell back from his wrinkled forehead. He was wearing the same old clothes--the tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers--that I knew so well. Probably he looked both tired and dirty, and a little disreputable. I reproached myself for the shortness of my letters to him. I saw now, in the light of after events, how I might have been a strength to him. He had given me everything; I had given him nothing. His fineness of feeling had led him to prevent my gratitude. Never by the slightest hint had he left me room to guess that I was beholden to him. And now he was beyond reach of thanks. I recalled how I had teased him as a youngster, and had courted popularity at his expense. When I was most angry against myself, I would drift back into the class-room where the boys were baiting him, and would hear him making his peace-offering, “Penthil, Cardover? Penthil, Buzzard? Want a penthil?” And then, in spite of indignation, I had to laugh. When Finals came on I won my First and in the autumn gained a history fellowship at Lazarus. It was worth two hundred pounds a year. It allowed me ample time to travel and was tenable for seven years, on the condition that I did not marry. BOOK III--THE GARDEN WITHOUT WALLS _And behind them a flame burneth: and the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness._ CHAPTER I--I MEET HER