Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he found that he could feel really at home with other “men.” He discovered qualities in them that he had never guessed before. In the cricket field even Douglas became tolerable; no longer a terrible and baleful influence with scowling brows under a mop of black hair, but just a jolly good wicket-keeper. Edwin began to be feverishly interested in the fortunes of the second eleven: kept their averages, produced an elaborate table of league results, conceived a secondary but violent interest in the progress of his own County, Worcestershire, in those days, thanks to the brilliancy of the Foster brothers—slowly rising to fame. Sometimes while he lay on the grass, watching his own side bat, he would see the figure of old, fat Leeming ambling along the path. He would shrink into the concealment of his uniform flannel, being afraid that his patron would speak to him and isolate him from his pleasant company. Leeming was not fond of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular joy. Only when he had passed relief would come. Great days . . . great days. III In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that Ingleby forsook his friends the poets. In the flush of early June, before the crowding of midsummer’s high pomps, there came to him many moments of ecstasy. In the spinney at the back of the head master’s house there was a nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All the twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds. Of all other times he remembered most clearly certain evenings when he would walk all alone up the long slope of the gravel-path from the chapel, hearing the whizzing wings of the cockchafers that made their home in the shrubs on either side. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days of all; not, indeed, because the chapel services made any religious appeal to him—the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long ago—but because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which the long day possessed and which, somehow, even the Head’s sermons failed to mar. He hated the Head’s sermons; he hated, in particular, the sight of Griffin, who was a useful member of the choir, singing, like any golden-headed cherub, a solo in the anthem. But he loved the music, and particularly the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar that he couldn’t help knowing many of them by heart.