l sunlight Michael
could have danced his exultation, before he ran home winged with the
ecstasy of a light heart.

Chapter VI: _Pax_

The Lower Fifth only knew Michael during the Autumn term. After
Christmas he moved up to the Middle Fifth, and, leaving behind him. many
friends, including Alan, he found himself in an industrious society
concentrated upon obtaining the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate
for proficiency in Greek, Latin, Mathematics and either Divinity, French
or History. Removed from the temptations of a merry company, Michael
worked very hard indeed and kept his brain fit by argument instead of
football. The prevailing attitude of himself and his contemporaries
towards the present was one of profound pessimism. The scholarship of
St. James' was deteriorating; there was a dearth of great English poets;
novelists were not so good as once they were in the days of Dickens; the
new boys were obviously inferior to their prototypes in the past; the
weather was growing worse year by year; the country was plunging into an
abyss. In school Michael prophesied more loudly than any of his fellow
Jeremiahs, and less and less did it seem worth while in these
Certificate-stifled days to seek for romance or poetry or heroism or
adventure. Yet as soon as the precincts of discipline and study were
left behind, Michael could extract from life full draughts of all these
virtues.

Without neglecting the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate he
devoured voraciously every scrap of information about Catholicism which
it was possible to acquire. Books were bought in tawdry
repositories--Catholic Belief, The Credentials of the Catholic Church,
The Garden of the Soul, The Glories of Mary by S. Alphonso Liguori,
Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, The Clifton Tracts, and on his own
side of the eternal controversy, Lee's Validity of English Orders, The
Alcuin Club Transactions with many other volumes. Most of all he liked
to pore upon the Tourist's Church Guide, which showed with asterisks and
paragraph marks and sections and daggers what churches throughout the
United Kingdom possessed the five points of Incense, Lights, Vestments,
Mixed Chalice and Eastward Position. He found it absorbing to compare
the progress of ritual through the years.

Michael, as once he had known the ranks of the British Army from
Lance-corporal to Field Marshal, could tell the hierarchy from Sexton to
Pope. He knew too, as once he knew