ernon's neck, and then held him in front to have a look at
him.

"How tall you've grown, Verny, and how well you look," he said, gazing
proudly at him; and indeed the boy was a brother to be justly proud of.
And Vernon quite returned the admiration as he saw the healthy glow of
Eric's features, and what a tall strong boy he had grown to be.

And so they quickly joined Mrs Trevor, who embraced her nephew with a
mother's love; and, amid all that nameless questioning of delightful
trifles, that "blossoming vein" of household talk, which gives such an
incommunicable charm to the revisiting of home, they all three turned
into the house, where Eric, hungry with his travels, enjoyed at leisure
the "jolly spread" prepared for him, luxurious beyond anything he had
seen for his last year at school. When he and Vernon went up to their
room at night--the same little room in which they slept on the night
when they first had met--they marked their heights on the door again,
which showed Eric that in the last year he had grown two inches, a fact
which he pointed out to Vernon with no little exultation. And then they
went to bed, and to a sleep over which brooded the indefinite sensation
of a great unknown joy;--that rare heavenly sleep which only comes once
or twice or thrice in life, on occasions such as this.

He was up early next morning, and, opening his window, leaned out with
his hands among the green vine-leaves which encircled it. The garden
looked beautiful as ever, and he promised himself an early enjoyment of
those currants which hung in ruby clusters over the walls. Everything
was bathed in the dewy balm of summer morning, and he felt very happy
as, with his little spaniel frisking round him, he visited the great
Newfoundland in his kennel, and his old pet the pony in the stable. He
had barely finished his rounds when breakfast was ready, and he once
more met the home circle from which he had been separated for a year.
And yet over all his happiness hung a sense of change and half
melancholy; they were not changed, but _he_ was changed.

Mrs Trevor, and Fanny, and Vernon were the same as ever, but over _him_
had come an alteration of feeling and circumstance; an unknown or
half-known _something_ which cast a shadow between them and him, and
sometimes made him half shrink and start as he met their loving looks.
Can no schoolboy, who reads his history, understand and explain the
feeling which I mean?

By that mail