gling moonlight, he saw the whole
buildings standing out black in the night air. The past lay behind him
like a painting. Many and many unhappy or guilty hours had he spent in
that home, and yet those last four years had not gone by without their
own wealth of life and joy. He remembered how he had first walked
across that playground, hand in hand with his father, a little boy of
twelve. He remembered his first troubles with Barker, and how his
father had at last delivered him from the annoyances of his old enemy.
He remembered how often he and Russell had sat there, looking at the
sea, in pleasant talk, especially the evening when he had got his first
prize and head-remove in the lower-fourth; and how, on the night of
Russell's death, he had gazed over that playground from the sick-room
window. He remembered how often he had got cheered there for his feats
at cricket and football, and how often he and Upton, in old days, and he
and Wildney afterwards, had walked there on Sundays, arm in arm. Then
the stroll to Fort Island, and Barker's plot against him, and the
evening at the Stack, passed through his mind; and the dinner at "The
Jolly Herring," and, above all, Vernon's death. Oh! how awful it seemed
to him now, as he looked through the darkness at the very road along
which they had brought Verny's dead body. Then his thoughts turned to
the theft of the pigeons, his own drunkenness, and then his last cruel,
cruel experiences, and this dreadful end of the day which, for an hour
or two, had seemed so bright on that very spot where he stood. Could it
be that this (oh, how little he had ever dreamed of it)--that this was
to be the conclusion of his schooldays?

Yes, in those rooms, of which the windows fronted him, there they lay,
all his school-fellows--Montagu, and Wildney, and Duncan, and all whom
he cared for best. And there was Mr Rose's light still burning in the
library window; and he was leaving the school and those who had been
with him there so long, in the dark night, by stealth, penniless, and
broken-hearted, with the shameful character of a thief.

Suddenly Mr Rose's light moved, and fearing discovery or interception,
he roused himself from the bitter reverie and fled to Starhaven through
the darkness. There was still a light in the little sailors' tavern,
and, entering, he asked the woman who kept it, "if she knew of any ship
which was going to sail next morning?"

"Why, your'n is, bean't it, Mai