"I mustn't." His flattery loosened her tongue. "He wouldn't like it. Go and get dressed, my son. I'll have your porridge heated in ten minutes." So after breakfast he set off alone, with a packet of sandwiches in one pocket and the forbidden book in the other. He followed the little track amidst the bracken, and, having mounted, looked down on the watered valley and across it at the opposing hills, and his love and need of the place leaped in him like a thing alive, and mingled with the steady happiness of doing his chosen work. He remembered the summer evening of the year before, when he had come home from Oxford for the last time. He returned, having done the thing he meant to do, and his degree was not a disappointment even to himself, but neither was it a surprise; and if it was possible to have a deeper satisfaction than that of holding the thing for which he had reached out, it was in the sure knowledge of the use to which that thing must be put. An earlier generation might have made a preacher of him, his own pointed to the school and not the church. He believed he had been born to teach; he found his most potent temptation in his lust for giving knowledge, and though not the least worthy of desires, it was none the less a self-indulgence. But its gratification was not always pleasant, and after suffering some of the sharp pangs that youth knows how to inflict on youth, he learnt to hold his tongue among his peers. He had that cruel lesson in his first year, and for the other three he contented himself with listening. The power of observation taught by loneliness was turned on the men who seemed so light-heartedly young to him. He liked them, he had a kind of envy of them, and watched the gambols of their minds and bodies with the melancholy pleasure of an old sheep looking on the lambs of spring. He had the good sense not to try imitation, but he spent on them the study which he was incapable of withholding from anything that fronted him, and if he saw little of women during those years, he had, at the end of them, as good an understanding of men as his youth could compass, and one that steadied his belief that there was no higher calling than the one he meant to follow. The contest in his mind, as he walked homeward that night, a year ago, had been between ambition and a duty whose existence he did not disclaim. Here was his mother and her need of a sane being in her house, and beyond there was a large world with a place in it for his ability. With all the garnered control of his strength he wanted to find that place and fill it, yet it seemed the gods willed otherwise, for in his pocket there lay a letter offering him a mastership at his old Grammar School, and it was pressing against his side with the urgency of a command, pricking him with a pointed question. Was it the personal ambition or the impersonal ideal on which his eyes were set? It was easy to entangle the two so that the answer fitted with his will, and he