Towards the end of the meal he had begun to wonder if it had been Clare's object to put him in just that mood of fierce aggressiveness and truculence. He wished he had not thrown the letter into the fire. He would like to have re-read it, and to have studied the phrasing with a view to more accurate interpretation. That was about seven-thirty in the morning. The bells were just beginning to ring in the dormitories and the floors above to creak with the beginnings of movement. It was a dull morning in early March, cold, but not freezing; the sky was full of mist and clouds, and very likely it would rain later. As he looked out of the window, for what might be the last time in his life, he realised that he was leaving Millstead without a pang. It astonished him a little. There was nothing in the place that he still cared for. All his dreams were in ruins, all his hopes shattered, all his enthusiasms burned away; he could look out upon Millstead, that had once contained them all, without love and without malice. It was nothing to him now; a mere box of bricks teeming with strangers. Even the terror of it had vanished; it stirred him to no emotion at all. He could leave it as casually as he could a railway station at which he had stopped _en route_. And when he tried, just by way of experiment, to resuscitate for a moment some of the feelings he had once had, he was conscious only of immense mental strain, for something inside him that was sterile and that ached intolerably. He remembered how, on the moonlight nights of his first term, his eyes would fill with tears as he saw the great window-lit blocks of Milner's and Lavery's rising into the pale night. He remembered it without passion and without understanding. He was so different now from what he had been then. He was older now; he was tired; his emotions had been wrung dry; some of him was a little withered. An hour later he left Millstead quite undramatically by the 9.5. The taxi came to the door of Lavery's at ten minutes to nine, while the school was in morning chapel; as he rode away and out of the main gates he could hear, faintly above the purr of the motor, the drone of two hundred voices making the responses in the psalms. It did not bring to his heart a single pang or to his eye a single tear. Helen sat beside him and she, too, was unmoved; but she had never cared for Millstead. She was telling him about Seacliffe. As the taxi bounded into the station yard she said: "Oh, Kenneth, did you leave anything for Burton?" "No," he answered, curtly. "You ought to have done," she said. That ended their conversation till they were in the train.