Then he went downstairs into the drawing-room of his own house where Helen was. He went in smiling. Helen was silent, but he knew from experience that silence with her did not necessarily betoken unhappiness. Yet even so, he found such silences always unnerving. To-night he wanted, if she had been in the mood, to laugh, to be jolly, to bludgeon away his fears. He would not have minded getting slightly drunk.... But she was silent, brooding, no doubt, happily, but with a sadness that was part of her happiness. As he passed by the table in the dimly-lit room he knocked over the large cash-box full of the monies that the boys had banked with him. It fell on to the floor with a crash which made all the wires in the piano vibrate. "Aren't you careless?" said Helen, quietly, looking round at him. He looked at her, then at the cash-box on the floor, and said finally: "Damn it all! A bit of noise won't harm us. This isn't a funeral." He said it sharply, exasperated, as if he were just trivially enraged. After he had said it he stared at her, waiting for her to say something. But she made no answer, and after a long pause he solemnly picked up the cash-box. III There came a January morning when he had a sudden and almost intolerable longing to see Clare. The temperature was below freezing-point, although the sun was shining out of a clear sky; and he was taking five _alpha_ in art drawing in a room in which the temperature, by means of the steamiest of hot-water pipes, had been raised to sixty. His desk was at the side of a second-floor window, and as he looked out of it he could see the frost still white on the quadrangle and the housemaids pouring hot water and ashes on the slippery cloister-steps. He had, first of all, an urgent desire to be outside in the keen, crisp air, away from the fugginess of heated class-rooms; then faintly-heard trot of horses along the Millstead lane set up in him a restlessness that grew as the hands of his watch slid round to the hour of dismissal. It was a half-holiday in the afternoon, and he decided to walk up to Dinglay Fen, taking with him his skates, in case the ice should be thick enough. The thought of it, cramped up in a stuffy class-room, was a sufficiently disturbing one. And then, quite suddenly, there came into his longing for the fresh air and the freedom of the world a secondary longing--faint at first, and then afterwards stormily insurgent--a longing for Clare to be with him on his adventures. That was all. He just wanted her company, the tread of her feet alongside his on the fenland roads, her answers to his questions, and her questions for him to answer. It was a strange want, it seemed to him, but a harmless one; and he saw no danger in it.