Then the pair went and dined at the hotel, where Val recovered his spirits; and then the old lord took the boy to his little room, where they found his things unpacked, and his pictures standing in a little heap against the wall, and his room almost filled up with the bed which had been folded up out of the way when they were there before. It was not like the luxurious large airy room which had been Val’s at home, any more than the house with its long passages, with regiments of doors on either side, was like the old-fashioned arrangements of Rosscraig. And here at last the parting so often rehearsed had to be done in earnest. “Master yourself,” said the old lord, with a voice which was neither so cheery nor so firm as he meant it to be; “and God bless you, Val!” And then he was gone, walking up the dark street with a heavy heart in his old bosom, and his eyebrows working furiously. And Val sat down upon his bed and looked round him wonderingly, and for the first time realised that he was left alone. However, it is needless to enter upon the details of so very common a scene. Perhaps the boy shed a few tears silently when the maid took away his candle, and he felt that no soft step, subdued lest he should be sleeping, no rustling silken garments, could come into his room that night. In the morning he faced his new existence vigorously, and hung his pictures, and began his work without any weakness of recollection. The old people felt it a great deal more, and a great deal longer; but Val could not have been known from the most accustomed and habitual schoolboy, and, stranger still, scarcely knew himself for anything else, after that night. At the end of the week he felt as if he had lived there all his life--as if he had been there before in some previous kind of existence. I suppose this readiness of a child to adapt itself to new habits, and make them its own, does but increase the strange unreality of life itself to the half-conscious mind--life which changes in a moment, so that one week seems like years, and years, being past, look as if they had never been. At the end of the week Val wrote home; and in his first letter there was this paragraph, written in his clearest hand:-- “Tell grandpapa I rowed up to Surly Hall, a long way above where we walked, above locks, _in an outrigger_, this morning. I rowed another fellow and licked him. I passed swimming on Thursday, and _outriggers is very_ easy. You have nothing to do but keep steady, and it flies like a bird.” “What is an outrigger?” said Lady Eskside, as she gave her husband the letter. The old lord gave an internal shiver, and thanked heaven that she did not remember; and Val did not think it necessary to inform his anxious grand-parents how often he had swamped his little craft on the Friday, before he succeeded in making that triumphal progress to Surly on Saturday morning. “He’s a determined rascal, that boy of yours, my lady,” was all the answer Lord Eskside made.