“My word!” said Traill, filling his pipe, “what a horrible picture of things! You must be out of sorts. Why, it's hysteria!” Birkland had crawled back into his chair again. He puffed at his pipe. “Oh! of course you don't see it!” he said. “After all, why should you? But it's true, every word of it. Oh! I'm resigned enough now. Besides, it's the beginning of the term. I'm inclined to think it's untrue, myself, just now. Wait and see. Watch White after he's had an interview with the Head—see Perrin and Comber together later on—study Mrs. Comber. But don't you bother. You won't listen to me—why should you? Only, in ten years' time you 'll remember.” After that they talked of other things. Birkland was rather amusing in his sharp, caustic way. “I say,” said Traill as he stood by the door on the way out, “that was all rot; was n't it?” “What was?” asked Birkland. “Why, about the place—this place.” “All rot!” said Birkland gravely. III. But of course one dismisses these things very soon—especially, and immediately, if the person in question is Archie Traill. Why think about a problematic and depressing forty? Take these men that Birkland so gloomily points to as disappointing and unsatisfactory exceptions. Life is like that. There are always the riders who collapse into ditches and sit there mumbling, wishing for the company, down in the dirt and the grime, of their fellow-horsemen. Meanwhile there is this fine autumn weather. Birkland remains a crabbed shadow; life is sharp, pungent—formed with faint blue skies, dim and shining like clear glass with a hard yellow sun stuck like a tethered balloon between saucer-clouds. Archie Traill, on a free afternoon—an early frost had made the ground too hard for football—in the week after that Birkland evening, stood in the village street as the church clock struck half-past three, and he thanked God for a half-holiday. The air was so still that the distant mining stamps and the breaking sea had it for the plain of their unceasing war, cannon against cannon, and the withdrawing rattle of their rival shot echoing against the blue horizon and the stiff side of the Brown Hill. The village cobbles shone and glittered; the gray roofs lay like carpets spread to dry. The brown church tower seemed to sway—so motionless was the rest of the world—with the clatter of its chiming clocks. Suddenly Isabel Desart turned the corner. “Good afternoon, Mr. Traill,” and the clasp of her hand was strong and clean as all the rest of her movements. She smiled at him as she always smiled, a little ironically and also a little seriously, as though she found the world a strange place, ought to think it a solemn one, but couldn't help finding it funny. Three old women, their skirts kilted about them, their eyes fixed on vacancy, flung their voices into the silence like balls against a board. “And she only sixteen—what a size!” “Only sixteen!—to think of it!” “With her great legs and all!” “Only sixteen...!”