r from home was his chief stumbling-block. He loved his father
and mother with almost passionate devotion; he clung to his home with an
intensity of concentrated love. He really had tried to please them, and
to do his best; but yet they didn't seem to give him credit for it.
Look at this cold reproachful letter; it maddened him to think of it.

There was only one thing which checked him. It was a little voice,
which had been more silent lately, because other and passionate tones
were heard more loudly; but yet even from a child poor Walter had been
accustomed to listen with reverence to its admonitions. It was a voice
behind him saying--"This is the way, walk ye in it," now that he was
turning aside to the right-hand or to the left. But the noble accents
in which it whispered of patience were drowned just now in the clamorous
turbulence of those other voices of appeal.

The two hours of detention were over, and the struggle was over too.
Walter drew his pen with a fierce and angry scrawl over the lines he had
written, showed them up to the master in attendance with a careless and
almost impudent air, and was hardly out of the room before he gave a
shout of emancipation and defiance. Impatience and passion had won the
day.

He ran up to the playground as hard as he could tear to work off the
excitement of his spirits, and get rid of the inward turmoil. On a
grass bank at the far end of it he saw two boys seated, whom he knew at
once to be Henderson and Kenrick, who, for a wonder, were reading, not
green novels, but Shakespeare!

"I'll tell you what it is, Henderson," he said; "I _can't_ and I _won't_
stand this any longer. It's the last detention breaks the boy's back.
I hate Saint Winifred's, I hate Dr Lane, I hate Robertson, and I _hate,
hate, hate_ Paton!" he said, stamping angrily.

"Hooroop!" said Henderson; "so the patient Evson is on fire at last.
Tell it not to Dubbs."

"Why, Walter, what's all this about?" asked Kenrick.

"Why, Ken," said Walter, more quietly, "here's a history of my life:
Greek grammar, lines, detention, caning--caning, detention, lines, Greek
grammar. I'm sick of it; I _can't_ and I _won't_ stand it any more."

"Whether," spouted Henderson, from the volume on his knee--

"`Whether 'twere nobler for the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
And by opposing end them!'"

"End them I will," said Walter; "