The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. The couples began to drift towards the northern end of the Quad, where the gates were being unbolted. For five minutes exactly the gravel of the wide path sloping to the chapel gave out a grating sound beneath the pressure of many hundred feet. The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty entered the porch. All the life of that dark mass of buildings spread upon the bare edge of the downs became concentrated within the walls of the chapel. Its stained glass windows glowed as with some spiritual radiance. Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the beginning of the term:— “Rank by rank again we stand From the four winds gathered hither, Loud the hallowed walls demand Whence we come and how and whither . . .” and from the open doors there issued a faintly musty smell, as though indeed the dead air of the holiday-time were dispossessed and young life had again invaded its ancient haunt. II It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the concentrated delights of this summer term were surely enough to efface every memory of discomfort and suffering that had clouded his early days at St. Luke’s. He was exceptionally happy in his new form. The form-master, whose name was Cleaver, was an idle man with a young wife and a small income of his own, circumstances that combined to make him contented with the conditions of servitude at St. Luke’s which weighed so heavily on the disappointed and underpaid Selby. He was also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship which was the prerogative of an old “blue,” and convinced in his own mind—if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so positive as a conviction—that the main business of the summer term was cricket. The atmosphere of the cricket-field, with its alternations of strenuousness and summery lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the traditions of that aristocratic game, in which nobody could conceivably behave in a violent or unsportsmanlike manner, regulated his attitude towards the work of his form. Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average going at the departments of the game in which Mr. Cleaver was concerned: Latin and Greek and English. If, as occasionally happened, he made a century, Cleaver was ready to congratulate him as a sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by some yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat and didn’t slog. Even a fool who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver’s sympathy.