And then at night-time when the sky was black as jet and the wind from the fenlands howled round the tall chimney-stacks of Lavery's, Speed could feel more than ever the bigness of this thing of which he had become a part. The very days and nights took on characters and individualities of their own; Speed could, if he had thought, have given them all an identifying sound and colour: Monday, for instance, was brown, deepening to crimson as night fell: he was always reminded of it by the chord of E flat on the piano. That, of course, was perhaps no more than half-imagined idiosyncrasy. But it was certain that the days and nights were all shaped and conditioned by Millstead; and that they were totally different from the days and nights that were elsewhere in the world. On Sunday nights, for instance, Speed, observing a Lavery's custom to which he saw no objection, read for an hour to the Junior dormitory. The book was Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Speed had never heard of the book until the Juniors informed him that Mr. Lavery had got half-way through it during the previous term. After about three successive readings Speed decided that the book was too horrible to be read to Juniors just before bedtime, and accordingly refused to go on with it. "I shall put it in the House library," he said, "so if any of you wish to finish it you can do so in the daytime. And now we'll try something else. Can anybody suggest anything?" Somebody mentioned Stephen Leacock, and in future, Sunday evenings in the Junior dormitory at Lavery's were punctuated by roars of laughter. All the same, the sudden curtailment of _Dracula_ was, for a long while, a sore point with the Juniors. On the two half-holidays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, Speed had three or four of his House in to tea, taking them in rotation. This was a custom which Lavery, seeing in it no more than an unnecessary increase in his duties and obligations, had allowed to fall into disuse. Nor were the majority of the boys keen on Speed's resumption of what had been, more often than not, an irksome social infliction. They were, however, gratified by the evident interest that he took in them, and most of them, when they thankfully escaped from the ordeal back to their fellows in the Common-Room, admitted that he was "quite a decent sort of chap." Speed believed in the personal relationship between each boy and his housemaster with an almost fanatical zeal. He found out what each boy was interested in, and, without prying into anybody's private affairs, contrived to establish himself as a personal factor in the life of the House and not as a vague and slatternly deity such as Lavery had been. Four o'clock therefore, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, saw Speed's tiny drawing-room littered with cakes and toasted scones, and populated by three or four nervous youngsters trying desperately to respond to Speed's geniality and to balance cups and saucers and plates on their knees without upsetting anything.