In a little hollow littered with tins and other debris, and choked with nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath, and, for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew-pond of dirty water. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting, he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just the same. “I oughtn’t to be more miserable now than I was when I came up here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, I felt ripping.” None of these sober reflections relieved him. All the rest of the way back he felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic seized him at the point when he reached the college palings. At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting. “Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white. “What’s the matter?” cried Edwin. “Oh, Lord, it’s the Head.” The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here? Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?” “Yes, sir.” A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this? What are you doing there?” A moment of brilliant inspiration. “Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence. May I get it, sir?” “Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law. Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds. Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole career.” Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with fear. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.” “Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?” “I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.” Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.” “Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology. Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,— “Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?” “Yes, sir.”