As for Tom’s school course, it went on with mill-like monotony, his mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium of uninteresting or unintelligible ideas. But each vacation he brought home larger and larger drawings with the satiny rendering of landscape, and water-colours in vivid greens, together with manuscript books full of exercises and problems, in which the handwriting was all the finer because he gave his whole mind to it. Each vacation he brought home a new book or two, indicating his progress through different stages of history, Christian doctrine, and Latin literature; and that passage was not entirely without results, besides the possession of the books. Tom’s ear and tongue had become accustomed to a great many words and phrases which are understood to be signs of an educated condition; and though he had never really applied his mind to any one of his lessons, the lessons had left a deposit of vague, fragmentary, ineffectual notions. Mr Tulliver, seeing signs of acquirement beyond the reach of his own criticism, thought it was probably all right with Tom’s education; he observed, indeed, that there were no maps, and not enough “summing”; but he made no formal complaint to Mr Stelling. It was a puzzling business, this schooling; and if he took Tom away, where could he send him with better effect? By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King’s Lorton, the years had made striking changes in him since the day we saw him returning from Mr Jacobs’s academy. He was a tall youth now, carrying himself without the least awkwardness, and speaking without more shyness than was a becoming symptom of blended diffidence and pride; he wore his tail-coat and his stand-up collars, and watched the down on his lip with eager impatience, looking every day at his virgin razor, with which he had provided himself in the last holidays. Philip had already left,—at the autumn quarter,—that he might go to the south for the winter, for the sake of his health; and this change helped to give Tom the unsettled, exultant feeling that usually belongs to the last months before leaving school. This quarter, too, there was some hope of his father’s lawsuit being decided; _that_ made the prospect of home more entirely pleasurable. For Tom, who had gathered his view of the case from his father’s conversation, had no doubt that Pivart would be beaten. Tom had not heard anything from home for some weeks,—a fact which did not surprise him, for his father and mother were not apt to manifest their affection in unnecessary letters,—when, to his great surprise, on the morning of a dark, cold day near the end of November, he was told, soon after entering the study at nine o’clock, that his sister was in the drawing-room. It was Mrs Stelling who had come into the study to tell him, and she left him to enter the drawing-room alone.