he has changed a good deal lately."
At that moment Kenrick passed by arm in arm with Harpour, as though to
confirm Power's words, and recognised him with an ostentatiously
careless nod.

It was thus that Walter's first year at Saint Winifred's ended; and in
spite of all drawbacks he felt that it had been a distinguished and
happy year. He was now yearning for home, and he felt that he could
meet his dear ones with honest pride. He made arrangements to
correspond with Henderson and Eden in the holidays, and Power promised
again to visit him at Semlyn, on condition that he would come back with
him and spend a week at Severn Park, so that there might be a double
bond of union between them.

Very early the next morning the boys were swarming into coaches,
carriages, brakes, and every conceivable vehicle which could by any
possibility convey them to the nearest station. A hearty cheer
accompanied each coach as it rolled off with its heavy and excited
freight; by nine o'clock not a boy was left behind. The great buildings
of Saint Winifred's were still as death; the footfall of the chance
passer-by echoed desolately among them. A strange, mournful, conscious
silence hung about the old monastic pile. The young life which usually
played like the sunshine over it, was pouring unwonted brightness into
many happy English homes.

It was late in the afternoon when Walter found himself on the top of the
hill which looks down over Semlyn Lake. The water lay beneath him a
sheet of placid silver; the flowers were scattered on every side in
their beds of emerald and sunlit moss; the air, just stirred by the
light breeze, was rich and balmy with the ambrosial scent of the summer
groves; and high overhead the old familiar hills reared their
magnificent summits into the deep unclouded blue. But Walter's bright
eye was fixed on one spot only of the enchanting scene--the spot where
the gables of his father's house rose picturesquely on the slope above
the lake, and where a little bay in the sea of dark green firs gave him
a glimpse of their garden, in which he could discover the figures of his
brothers and sisters at their play. A sense of unspoken, unspeakable
happiness flowed into the boy's warm heart, and if at the same moment
his eyes were suffused with tears, they were the tears that always
spring up when the fountain of the heart is stirred by any strong
emotion to its inmost depths--the tears that come even in laughter to