It was part of Speed's dream of the ideal housemaster and his ideal House that the housemaster's wife should fulfil a certain difficult and scrupulously exact function in the scheme of things. She must not, of course, attempt any motherly intimacies, or call people by their Christian names, or do anything else that was silly or effusive; yet, on the other hand, there was a sense in which her relationship with the boys, especially the Juniors, might be less formal than her husband's. And, somehow, Speed was forced to admit that Helen did not achieve this extraordinarily delicate equipoise. She was, he came to the conclusion, too young for it to be possible. When she grew older, no doubt she would, in that particular respect, improve, but for the present she was, perhaps naturally, nervous in the presence of the elder boys and apt to treat the Juniors as if they were babies. Gradually she formed the habit of going over to the Head's house for tea whenever Speed entertained the boys in his room; it was an arrangement which, accomplished silently and without definition. Speed felt to be rather a wise one. IV Clare Harrington had left Millstead. One breakfast time a letter came from her with the Paris postmark. Out of the envelope tumbled a number of small snapshots; Speed scanned the letter through and remarked, summing up its contents roughly for Helen's benefit: "Oh, Clare's in France. Been having rather a good time, I should imagine--touring about, you know." Helen looked up suddenly. "I didn't know she wrote to _you_," she said. Speed answered, casually: "She doesn't, as a rule. But she knows I'm interested in architecture--I expect that's why she sent me all these snaps. There's one here of ..." he picked them up and glanced through them ... "of Chartres Cathedral ... the belfry at Bruges ... some street in Rouen.... They're rather good--have a look at them!" She examined them at first suspiciously, then with critical intensity. And finally she handed them back to him without remark. CHAPTER TWO I One dark dusk in November that was full of wind and fine rain Speed stood up at his drawing-room window to pull down the blind. But before doing so he gazed out at the dreary twilight and saw the bare trees black and terrible beyond the quadrangle and the winking lights of Milner's across the way. He had seen all of it so many times before, had lived amongst it, so it now seemed to him, for ages; yet to-night there was something in it that he had never seen before: a sort of sadness that was abroad in the world. He heard the wind screaming through the sodden trees and the branches creaking, the rain drops splashing on the ivy underneath the window: it seemed to him that Millstead was full that night of beautiful sorrow, and that it came over the dark quadrangle to him with open arms, drenching all Lavery's in wild and forlorn pathos.