f, and others. Go to your place."

And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more
terribly rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled
frown; little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him
six forms off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the
authors of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want
of humor, the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign of
first-rate stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with delight
the little bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once,
but rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire
when a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the salvation
of Tod! Or--his damnation? Which? God would know, but Felix was not
certain. Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill' philosophy,
and another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think
that after all there might be something in it. A philosophy that took
everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was
sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the
insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration. Tod,
of course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one
naturally would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired
'Mill' manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a
man as you could meet.

Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home under
a sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings. Between
the pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like pinkish
stone, and all around violent purple with flames of the young green,
and white spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and
unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered
torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.

He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.

The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them--admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers,
the books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: "By George, do I really o