e their friends'
female relations. So the week would fulfil its pleasant course until
nine o'clock on Monday morning, when Michael and Alan would run all the
way to school and in a fever of industry get through their home work
with the united assistance of the rest of the Upper Fourth A, as one by
one the diligent members arrived in Hall for a few minutes' gossip
before Prayers. During Prayers, Michael and Alan would try to forecast
by marking off the full stops what paragraph of Cicero they would each
be called upon to construe; finally, when old Caryll named Merivale to
take up the oration's thread, Michael would hold the crib on his knees
and over Levy's laborious back whisper in the voice of a ghoul the
meaning.

At Christmas, after interminable discussion and innumerable catalogues,
the bicycles were bought, and in the Lent term with its lengthening
twilights Michael and Alan devoted all their attention to bicycling,
except in wet weather, when they played Fives, bagging the covered
courts from small boys who had waited days for the chance of playing in
them. Michael, during the Lent term, often rode back with Alan after
School to spend the week-end at Richmond, and few delights were so rare
as that of scorching over Barnes Common and down the Mortlake Road with
its gardens all a-blow with spring flowers and, on the other bank of the
river over Kew, the great spring skies keeping pace with their whirring
wheels.

Yet best of all was the summer term, that glorious azure summer term of
fourteen and a half, which fled by in a radiancy. Michael and Alan were
still in the Upper Fourth A under Mr. Caryll: they still fooled away the
hours of school, relying upon the charm of their joint personality to
allay the extreme penalty of being sent up to the Headmaster for
incorrigible knavery. They were Captain and Vice-Captain of the
Classical Upper Fourth Second Eleven, preferring the glory of leadership
to an ambiguous position in the tail of the First Eleven. Michael and
Alan were in their element during that sunburnt hour of cricket before
afternoon school. They wore white felt hats, and Michael in one of his
now rare flights of imagination thought that Alan in his looked like
Perseus in a Flaxman drawing. Many turned to look at the two friends, as
enlaced they wandered across the 'gravel' on their way to change out of
flannels, Michael nut-brown and Alan rose-bloomed like a peach.

At five o'clock they would eat a rowdy