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mer, but during the rest of the year it was quiet: boys used to
wander round sometimes arm in arm, or a studious fellow
with abstracted gaze walked slowly, repeating to himself
something he had to learn by heart. There was a colony of
rooks in the great elms, and they filled the air with melan-
choly cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great
central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beau-
ty, felt when he looked at it a troubling delight which he
could not understand. When he had a study (it was a little
square room looking on a slum, and four boys shared it),
he bought a photograph of that view of the Cathedral, and
pinned it up over his desk. And he found himself taking a
new interest in what he saw from the window of the Fourth
Form room. It looked on to old lawns, carefully tended, and
fine trees with foliage dense and rich. It gave him an odd
feeling in his heart, and he did not know if it was pain or
pleasure. It was the first dawn of the aesthetic emotion. It
accompanied other changes. His voice broke. It was no lon-
ger quite under his control, and queer sounds issued from
his throat.
Then he began to go to the classes which were held in
the headmaster’s study, immediately after tea, to prepare
boys for confirmation. Philip’s piety had not stood the test
of time, and he had long since given up his nightly reading
of the Bible; but now, under the influence of Mr. Perkins,
with this new condition of the body which made him so
restless, his old feelings revived, and he reproached himself
bitterly for his backsliding. The fires of Hell burned fiercely
before his mind’s eye. If he had died during that time when

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