The world was quite all right, a warm, scented, sunlit world. Wessex lay in a hollow formed by two ranges of hills, disputing the little valley with the East Fork River. Directly in front of Barry, across the road, stood a white house very like the one behind him. From an upstairs window of it came faint, tentative sounds as of a bow being drawn lightly across the strings of a violin. They were not unpleasant. Beyond the opposite dwelling the land ran levelly to a marsh streaked in the lengthening rays of the sun with russet and pinkish brown. Half a mile away the hills began, climbing steeply to a dome-shaped mountain on the north and waving southward in a series of lesser elevations. Cows were grazing below the knoll that held the shaded farm buildings, and a bell tinkled at intervals. Yes, the world was a perfectly good world, and Barry approvingly dismissed it from his thoughts and reverted to that second subject, the future. Somehow Broadmoor School had disappointed him. Or, since save for a hasty glance from a window of his room he had not yet seen the school, the circumstances attending his arrival had disappointed him. First there had been Clyde’s failure to meet him punctually. Then there had been his introduction to that upstairs room. It had been five days since he learned that he was not to share Number 42 Dawson with his friend, and so that disappointment was no longer fresh, but――well, the substitute for the dormitory room was rather awful. Barry had assured Clyde that it was quite satisfactory, but that was just because he hadn’t wanted to hurt Clyde’s feelings. To be sure, the room was clean and neat, but it was also threadbare; and the five pieces of furniture, a nondescript assemblage, looked horribly inadequate. There were the remains――Barry couldn’t think of a kinder word――of an ingrain art-square in the middle of the floor, a thing of faded greens and yellows, its borders frayed and its startling pattern relieved by many lapses of the fabric. It looked very lonely, for it was not a large carpet and the room, whatever else might be said of it, was spacious. Between the edges of the carpet and the walls lay broad expanses of painted floor, expanses of awful greenish gray that jarred Barry’s sensibilities. As though in atonement for the floor, the plastered walls had been unevenly calcimined in pale pink. Barry shuddered at the recollection.