His lip trembled. “Yes, Noll; I understand. I have seen you fret at many things here--as I myself have sometimes fretted at them.... I am able, too, to help you a little now--I have had a little windfall----” Noll left the window and went to his mother. He put his hands on her shoulders: “No, mother. I will have none of it. You ought not to be living in an attic--and I am not going to help to keep you there. It is one of the prospects that will make me work--that I should see you in your proper position. Not that, God knows, this attic has ever given me a moment’s shame; for you have made it a palace to me.” Caroline kissed his handsome face: “Noll,” said she--“you are something of a man.” CHAPTER XXXVII _Which is Uneasy with the Restlessness of Youth_ Sir Pompey Malahide came into his baronetcy on a fine summer’s day; and Noll spent the resulting week of high festivities with Horace and the family, and there strengthened his friendship with Bartholomew Doome, whose unsnobbish affection and care of the rough merchant won Noll’s regard even more than his grim humour. Horace, his father baroneted and the feasting done, decided to go to Paris for a change--“to get the odour of cooked bullocks from his nostrils.” Noll saw him off at the railway-station; saw his man Jonkin, of the ducal manner, tuck him up in his railway-carriage; watched the train slide out of the station--and sighed to lose the light-hearted companionship of the sunny youth. The departing of a comrade sends a cloud across the bluest sky. Noll, with the confidence of youth, decided to be a literary celebrity. He felt that it would be a brilliant and fascinating position to hold; and it required no capital. It was not to be bought. There was an air about it. But the having his own study and separate establishment did not raise the masterpiece out of the deeps--nor did the world thrill at his originality so readily as he had hoped. He did much chewing of the quill. Being young, he wrote for art’s sake; and it was the beginning of several affectations in which he half believed. His solitary hours of work, and of brooding upon work, were fretted with other and more overwhelming dreams. The rustle of women’s petticoats began to trouble him as he wrote. In the faces that passed him in the street he saw beckoning eyes under many a pretty bonnet. And the writing, dragging already for want of life and substance, now further dragged, interrupted by the frills and figures of women. All nature’s urging of the adolescent to part from the parent brood was calling upon him to pair; and the mystic fascination of the fragrance of women was enhanced by the restlessness of dawning manhood that vexes the lustiness of youth with the blatant trumpet-call to action, the fret to be up and about and doing. The dainty place that Betty had held by his side was empty. And the gentle companionship of the girl that had filled the lad’s life gave way to a vague hunger for affection.