He lay on his back and watched the clouds, but he did not see their procession; he saw his own. Success following success kept time with the filmy white across the blue, and then a future as wide as the expanse of sky was opened to him. In his dreams he filled and overflowed the place offered to him by a welcoming world, but, finding himself unduly swelling, he sat up with a start, warning himself not to be a fool. He had a hard head, and, long ago, he had learnt many kinds of self-control, and he did not mean to indulge his imagination more than his appetites. "It's nothing, anyway," he muttered. He looked at the ruffled water and shivered with it; he looked at the new green of the hillsides, where defiantly black rocks, starting out of it, proclaimed their perpetuity, and his heart turned sick with dread of going away. He could not do it, he told himself; he could not live outside his own place, yet, while he swore, he knew that he would do it, and he ceased protesting, for he had a horror of pretence. He would go, but would he be doing right? He thought of his mother on winter nights, sitting in the kitchen alone, listening for a step; he heard the wind crying round the house, and for once allowing himself to feel with her, he knew the trouble of her heart as she waited with none but the dog for company, and perhaps the spirit of the dead woman who had been a witch. Ought he to go? he asked again. "But I will go," he said aloud. He walked homewards, and he went lingeringly, more eager to feel the young heather under his feet than to tell his news. A few months, and he would walk on pavements; he would not breathe this wonderful, uplifting air. The sound of mountain water would only come to him in thoughts, and when he woke at night he would think the Blue Hill looked down on him until, leaping out of bed, as was his way, he would find nothing but grey walls and grass. He would hear the chiming of many clocks and, looking from his window, he would find the world empty for lack of the mountains and the babbling water and the smell of the uninhabited night. He sat down again. A turn of the path had brought him to a wider view. The hills here stretched their arms to hold the valley, and he saw the white walls of his home, the silver snake of water winding to the lake, the fringing trees, birches and mountain ash, and the dark cluster of the yews with the church roof shining in the midst of them, under the sun. The smell of peat rose warmly from the earth and the bleating of lambs was sweet in his accustomed ears. One had to pay dearly for conquests and satisfied desires, he found, and he was willing to pay the price demanded--the price of exile. "But it'll not be for all the year," he consoled himself; and then he wondered that he had not rejoiced at the promised separation from his father. What had once seemed a necessity for decent life had now fallen back among the unimportant things. He was learning much.