Awakening had come to the strongest races. Instinctively they had felt their failings, and had sought to combat them by an admixture of fresh blood. Everything, therefore, that is strong and good has some family for its progenitor, whose sufferings have been the foundation of its needs, its needs the foundation of its work; its work, its self-command, the foundation of its discoveries--all gathering round the original discovery. When the school should be alive with a hundred young creatures; when sparkling eyes gazed upon the aim which he had set up; when the elder ones among them, influenced by him, and in their turn influenced others--hoisted their colours--it would be remembered that they had lived in the house of one particular family, from that family they would have received their instruction. It was _he_ who had made the school. But there lay an inherent weakness in its inmost recesses. The germs of destruction lay in him who had built it up. He could not advance it further. He did not possess the necessary long-suffering gentleness. Plenty of foresight, energy, ambition, but--talents for war, perhaps, but not for peace. As he had walked along that evening after the lecture, sick at heart, anxious--ah! how anxious! because the certainty of years had been baffled, Karl Vangen had trudged silently by his side like a great long-legged dog with honest eyes. He went the same way now, only it was winter, and he was alone; he was ashamed to have any one with him. The suspicion of insecurity which had shaken him the first time was now a certainty. He could not go on--O God! he could not: he was a blight in the school. The snow in the fields had melted, but farther away it lay in patches, looking ghostly in the moonlight. It still lay thick under the fir-woods; and here and there on the road, which had frozen hard with deep ruts in it, and small sharp stones and solid horse-dung. Where it was bare, or partly bare, it was difficult to walk. He came back so weary in body and mind that he never remembered to have felt more tired. By the new churchyard, where his father and grandfather lay, and where the sea washed up to the other side of the roadway, rolling and black, he felt that a little might bring him into the one or beyond the other--or perhaps to both--they were not incompatible. It was past twelve, as on the night of the lecture; he would not go home before he felt certain that his mother had given up waiting for him. Under ordinary circumstances she went to bed between nine and ten. But as he struggled up the avenue, he saw that there was a light in the sitting-room; and as he got a little further, that there was one in Karl's room as well. If he had not been so utterly weary he would have turned back, but now things must go as they could. His mother met him in the hall with a light in her hand. "Oh, Tomas, how you have frightened me!" she whispered.