ces were healed and comforted.

But that had been only once. And then he wasn't sure that he hadn't
made it up. At all other times the thing was outside himself too
strange to have been imagined. It shook him from head to foot with
dread and longing. He wanted to run to meet it, to plunge into it,
reckless and shouting, as into a warm, dancing, summer sea. And yet it
menaced him. It was of fire and colour, of the rumble and thud of
armies, of laughter and singing and distant broken music. It was all
just round the comer. If he hurried he would see it, lose himself in
it, march to the tune he could never quite catch. But he was afraid,
and whilst he tried to make up his mind the light faded. The sounds
died. After all, it was only Christine, trudging wearily through the
dusk.

2

The six forms were marshalled in squares down the centre of the
drill-hall, Form I, with Robert Stonehouse at the bottom, holding the
place of dishonour under the shadow of the Headmaster's rostrum.
Robert did not know that he was at the bottom of Form I, or that such a
thing as Form I existed. He did not know that he was older than the
eldest of his class-mates, but he was aware of being unusually and
uncomfortably large. Under the curious stare that had greeted him on
his first appearance and which now pressed on him from the rear and
sides, he felt himself shoot up, inch by inch, into a horrible
conspicuousness, whilst his feet grew flat and leaden, and his hands
were too swollen to squeeze into his trousers pockets.

". . . we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and
we have done those things which we ought not to have done . . ."

He wondered what they were saying. It sounded rather like one of those
tongue-twisters which his father had taught him in a playful
moment--"round the rugged rock the ragged robber ran"--but it was
evidently no joking matter. And it was something which everyone knew
except himself. The urchin on his left piped it out in an assured,
self-satisfied treble. The clergyman kneeling behind the raised desk
came in with a bang at the beginning of each sentence, and then
subsided into an indistinguishable murmur. Evidently he knew what he
was saying so well that he did not need even to think about it, for his
eyes wandered over his folded hands as though in methodical search for
somebody. They reached Form I, and Robert, who saw them coming, broke
instinctively into a pani