He took her in his arms and kissed her more passionately than he had ever done before. It seemed to him then that he did love her, more deeply than anybody had loved anybody else since the world began, and that, so far from his being the least bit dissatisfied with her, she was still guiding him into fresh avenues of unexplored delight. She was the loveliest and most delicate thing in the world. V The great event of the winter term was the concert in aid of the local hospitals. It had taken place so many years in succession that it had become institutional and thoroughly enmeshed in Millstead tradition. It was held during the last week of the term in the Big Hall; the boys paid half-a-crown each for admission (the sum was included in their terminal bills), and outsiders, for whom there was a limited amount of accommodation, five shillings. The sum was artfully designed to exclude shop assistants and such-like from a function which was intended to be, in the strictest sense, exclusive. Millstead, on this solemn annual occasion, arrayed itself for its own pleasure and satisfaction; took a look at itself, so to say, in order to reassure itself that another year of social perturbation had mercifully left it entire. And by Millstead is meant, in the first instance, the School. The Masters, for once, discarded their gowns and mortar-boards and appeared in resplendent evening-suits which, in some cases, were not used at all during the rest of the year. Masters, retired and of immense age, rumbled up to the main gateway in funereal four-wheelers and tottered to their seats beneath the curious eyes of an age that knew them not. The wives of non-resident Masters, like deep-sea fishes that rarely come to the surface, blinked their pleased astonishment at finding everything, apparently, different from what they had been led to expect. And certain half-mythical inhabitants of the neighbourhood, doctors and colonels and captains and landed gentry, parked themselves in the few front rows like curious social specimens on exhibition. In every way the winter term concert at Millstead was a great affair, rivalling in splendour even the concentrated festivities of Speech Day.