"My dear fellow, I think you're by far the most sentimental chap I've ever come across!--Don't be hurt: it's not a crime. But it's just a bit of a danger, especially in writing a school-story. That atmosphere you talk about certainly _does_ exist, and if I had the gift of self-expression I might try to write about it. I can see it clearly enough, even though I'm not a scrap in love, and even on the dreariest of days in the winter term. My advice to you is to wait and see if you can do the same.... Good night, Speed!" "Good night," Speed called out, laughing. Down Clanwell's corridor and up the stone flight of stairs and along his own corridor to the door of his own room his heart was thumping violently, for he knew that as soon as he was alone he would be drenched in the wild, tumultuous rapture of his own thoughts. Clanwell's advice, hazily remembered, faded before the splendour of that coming onrush; the whole interview with Clanwell vanished as if it had never happened, as if there had been a sort of cataleptic vacuum intervening between that scene by the Head's gateway and the climb upstairs to his room. When he got to bed he could hardly sleep for joy. CHAPTER FOUR I The first thing that Clare Harrington said to him when they met a few days later in Millstead High Street was: "Oh, congratulations, Mr. Speed!" "Congratulations?" he echoed. "What for?" She replied quietly: "Helen has told me." He began to blush, and to hold his breath in an endeavour to prevent his cheeks from reddening to an extent that, so he felt, would be observed by passers-by. "Oh!" he gasped, with a half-embarrassed smile. Then, after a pause, he queried: "What has she told you?" And Clare answered: "That you are going to marry her." "Ah!" he exclaimed involuntarily, and he saw her eyes focussed on him strangely. A slow sensation of warmth began to envelop him; joy rose round him like a tide as he realised all the pivotal significance of what Clare had said. He was going to marry Helen!--Strange that, even amidst his most secret raptures, he had hardly dared to think of that! He had dreamed exquisite and fragile dreams of her, dreams in which she was too fairy-like and ethereal for marriage; doubtless, after some while, his ambitions would have crystallised normally, but up to the present they had no anchorage on earth at all. And to think that she had travelled in mind and intention more swiftly and further than he, to think that she had dared to deduce the final and ultimate reality, gave him, along with a surging overmastering joy, just a faint tinge of disappointment as well. But the joy, deepening and spreading, soon blotted out everything else: he sought Clare's hand and gripped it triumphantly. Tears were in his eyes and emotion clutching at his voice as he said: "I'm--I'm glad--she's told you. It's--it's fine, isn't it?--Don't you think we shall be--happy?" "You ought to be," said Clare.