And now the wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken army before knightly lances, and the roll of retreating thunder awoke echoes of the guns of Waterloo. . . . II It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s. Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship. They had crossed London together in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead with train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, and some smouldering ethic decreed that he must not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears were very unsettling; they gave him a sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of the platform. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that he wouldn’t have minded much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of all, that he clutched mechanically in his left-hand trouser pocket—or if the porters, in the fine free way they have, had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white and new, with E. INGLEBY 115 in black lettering on the lid.