“Anyhow, I'm glad you like it—being here. Mind you always do. I don't want to be pessimistic when you are just beginning; but—well, you don't mean to stay here for ever, do you?” “I should think not,” he answered eagerly. “Only a term or two at the most, and then I hope to go back to Clifton, my old school.” “That's right—because—really it isn't a very good place to be—this.” “Why not?” he asked. “It's difficult to explain without maligning people and making things out worse than they really are.” She paused a moment, and then she went on: “Do you know, at the bottom of the hill, just before you get into the village, a melancholy orchard? One always passes it. You will see at the right time of the year lots of green apples on the trees, but they never seem to come to anything. And such blossoms in the spring! I 've seen men working there sometimes. I don't know what it is, but nothing 's any good there. They call it in the village 'Green Apple Orchard.'... Well, I've stayed here a great deal, and there's an obvious comparison.” “That's cheerful,” he said, laughing. “It would, I suppose, be awful if one had to stay here for ever like Perrin and Dormer and the rest of them; but this time next year will see me somewhere better, I hope.” “Mind you stick to that,” she said eagerly. “I have a horrible kind of feeling that they all meant to go very soon; but here they are still—soured, disappointed. Oh! it doesn't bear thinking of.” “One must have ambition,” he answered her confidently. She smiled at him, and took his hand, and said good night. He went, smiling, to his room. As he climbed into bed, the storm broke furiously. CHAPTER IV—BIRKLAND LOQUITUR I. AT the end of his first month young Traill looked back, as it were from the top of a hill, and thought that it all had been very pleasant. How much of this pleasantness was due to Isabel (although he had seen her during that period extremely seldom) and how much of it was due to his agreeable acceptance of things as they were without any very definite challenge to them to be different, it is impossible to say. The crowded day had of course something to do with it: the fact that there was never from the first harsh clanging of the bell down the stone passages at half-past six to the last leap into bed, jumping as it were from a heap of Latin exercises and the cold challenge of Perrin's voice as he went round the dormitories turning lights out—never a moment's pause to think about anything extra at all. But he was in no way a reflective person. He saw that his own small boys in their untidy, scrambling kind of way liked him and that the bigger boys of the Upper Fourth, to whom he taught French twice a week, revered him because of his football. The masters at the Upper School seemed pleasant fellows, although he might, had he thought about it, have perceived dimly an atmosphere of unrest and discomfort in their common room.