Summer weather came like a strong flood about ten days after the opening of term, and then Millstead showed herself to him in all her serene and matchless beauty. He learned to know and expect the warm sunshine waking him in the mornings and creeping up the bed till it dazzled his eyes; he learned to know and to love the _plick-plock_ of the cricket that was his music as he sat by the open window many an afternoon at work. And at night time, when the flaring gas jets winked in all the tiny windows and when there came upwards the cheerful smell of coffee-making in the studies, it was all as if some subtle alchemy were at work, transforming his soul into the mould and form of Millstead. Something fine and mighty was in the place, and his soul, passionately eager to yield itself, craved for that full possession which Millstead brought to it. The spell was swift and glorious. Sometimes he thought of Millstead almost as a lover; he would stroll round at night and drink deep of the witchery that love put into all that he saw and heard; the sounds of feet scampering along the passage outside his door, the cold lawns with the moon white upon them, the soft delicious flower-scents that rose up to his bedroom window at night. The chapel seemed to him, to put it epigrammatically, far more important because it belonged to Millstead than because it belonged to Christ. Millstead, stiff-collared and black-coated on a Sunday morning, and wondering what on earth it should do with itself on Sunday afternoon, touched him far more deeply than did the chatter of some smooth-voiced imported divine who knew Millstead only from spending a bored week-end at the Head's house. To Speed, sitting in the Masters' pew, and giving vent to his ever-ready imagination, Millstead seemed a personification of all that was youthful and clear-spirited and unwilling to pay any more than merely respectful attention to the exhortations of elders. He did not sentimentalise over it. He was not old enough to think regretfully of his own school-days. It was the present, the present leaning longingly in the arms of the future, that wove its subtle and gracious spell. He did not kindle to the trite rhapsodies of middle-aged "old boys." The "Thoughts of an Old Millsteadian on Revisiting the School Chapel," published in the school magazine, stirred him not at all. But to wander about on a dark night and to find his feet beautifully at ease upon curious steps and corridors gave him pangs of exquisite lover-like intimacy; he was a "new boy," eager for the future, not an "old boy" sighing for the past. And all this was accomplished so swiftly and effortlessly, within a few weeks of his beginning at the school it was as if Millstead had filled a void in his soul that had been gaping for it.