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 bad drains. Paul could only shrink, and marvel. As though in a trance he still saw a waxen face surrounded by lilies; still felt the tightness of chest and the nameless awe; and with a terrible, child's accuracy of perception he retained the impression of freckles—five or six—brown, brown, brown, left stranded on a tiny white nose by the ebbing of life.

In those days he was an ardent Christian; a defender of the faith. He dwelt in Abram's bosom; he went nightly "to Jesus"; he won Sunday-school "mottoes" and celluloid buttons; he lived through the week in the ecstatic anticipation of the Sabbath; he believed in and communed with the heavenly hosts. And that waxen face, incongruously befreckled, hovered over him night and day, being especially present when he was in the attic thieving lumps of sugar from the box which had been sent to Aunt Verona in return for Sunlight Soap wrappers, or when he was pouring purloined milk into the batter of Gritty's mud-cakes. How often, before doing perfectly legitimate things—things a little boy must do every day—did he hesitate in painful embarrassment at the thought of a little girl angel looking on!

Romantic love for Leila had been so completely diffused in the wonderment which Paul continued to experience after she had been taken up to God, that it ceased to exist as a separate emotion, and gradually he made the discovery that girls bored him. He decided that when he grew up he would marry Miss Todd, and thus dismissed the whole issue of sex from his mind—always with an exception in favour of Gritty Kestrell, who was a tomboy. Gritty was two months older than himself and could climb trees and skate figure eights and run races with any boy in Hale's Turning. She had the added advantages of being able to do up sore fingers and hold her own with

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 girls, to outwit or champion them as the eternal ends of justice might decree. Gritty could umpire a boy's lacrosse match, or substitute if any member of either team were disabled. She scorned handicaps. She hadn't much patience with dolls, and tore off the wig of Myrtle Wilcove's doll from Halifax in order that its attack of scarlet fever should seem more realistic. But, overwhelmed by Myrtle's even more realistic grief, Gritty had promptly readjusted the wig with glue "swiped" from her father's workshop. When it came to sailing boats, Gritty would never learn how to trim the sails and point the rudder to the requirements of the breeze; but, if your boat got stuck in the reeds of the marsh pond, nobody was more resourceful than she in getting it back for you, and she would wade in up to her middle at a pinch. She was the only girl who had ever "shinned up" to the top of the school flagpole. Once she had eaten a grasshopper on a dare, and next day had blackened Bob Meddar's eye for calling her "Bugs."

As a matter of fact, boys also, except in the case of a very few individuals, bored Paul. Among them he was never quite free from the dread that he was out of the picture, that the slightest expression of his really-truly opinion, as distinct from a sort of feigned community opinion, would at once let him in for a repetition of the hostile manifestation that had ended so disastrously on his second day of school, Indeed, the umbrella exploit had been re-enacted many times in terms of mordant words.

Before his ninth birthday he had discovered himself out of step with boys who did not live in a bare, mysterious house with an eccentric aunt. Privately he endured tortures of doubt at his own unclassifiability, and the pain was made more poignant by a conviction that he, and certainly Aunt Verona, were for some inexplicable reason more entitled to deference than the Dreers and

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 Wilcoves, for all their frosted cakes and rubber-tyred carriages. There was scant balm in the knowledge that Aunt Verona had the finest piano in the province, for no one came to see it, and unless the windows were open and you played fortissimo it couldn't be heard from the street. Moreover, there was something absurd about his clothes. In summer-time the blouses which Aunt Verona made for him were considered girlish, and in winter-time his mittens and cap were too obviously hand-knitted. If he repeated stories which he had read in Aunt Verona's books—Oliver Twist and Kenilworth and Paul et Virginie—he was rated as "stuck-up." If he recited fables like "Un mal qui répand la terreur" or sang ditties like "Es klappert die Mühle," he was accused of showing off.

On the other hand if he merely remained on the edge of the circle trying to enter into the spirit of a discussion or a game, his self-consciousness condemned him to a subsidiary function. He merely held things, while others performed feats. Although he might efface himself for a time, his nature was such that he preferred solitude to being a nonentity. In his own yard he was more despotic. But Mark Laval and Walter Dreer and Gritty Kestrell were the only playmates who ever came to his yard, and of these only Mark Laval, the humblest, could be counted on to remain when more exciting games were elsewhere afoot.

To avoid mockery he tried concealing his eccentricities, but that involved a cultivation of false enthusiasms from which his nature recoiled more inexorably than it shrank from ridicule. Often enough he faithfully chased a ball or a puck in the hope that by so doing he might win from his playmates a reciprocal wisp of goodwill and understanding regarding his mental games—the images and ideas which his mind kept pursuing night and day. But whenever he invited others to share his images he was met with incomprehension or jeers. Only Mark and Walter

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 showed an interest in his ideas, and the latter had a way of steering them into dubious channels.

Meanwhile Paul was continually being put off the field for "fumbling the ball" or lack of team sense. His most familiar sensation came to be that of yearning, followed by retaliatory moods given over to the building of a wall of indifference, moods coloured by music and stories. Loneliness, fear, doubt were his familiars, and his confidante was an aunt who, if one were not infinitely tactful, would glide away and sit for hours looking out of the window at nothing. More and more he resorted to silence, and, where necessary—as in the case of clothes—defiance of public opinion, but there was a heavy mental and emotional price to pay for silence and defiance, and his shoulders were never free of the burden of anomaly. This gave a tentative quality even to his most spontaneous smiles and made him inordinately diffident.

One of the few beings with whom there was no need for play-acting was the sympathetic old Portuguese, and, in the twilight of summer evenings when Paul went off to the pasture to help drive home the cow from which Mr. Silva derived part of his small income, there was a blessed sense of security in the companionship. He had not been able to tell Mr. Silva about Leila, for there were no words for his feeling, but he had told him about the afternoon when he and Wilfrid Fraser had gone with empty tomato tins and an axe into the summer woods to hunt for maple sugar and by force of talking about the possibility of a bull appearing on the scene had turned and run for their lives, though there wasn't a bull within a mile. Mr. Silva had gently explained that maple sugar could be drawn only in the first months of the year when the snow was still on the ground. Anyone else would have mocked him for being so ignorant and timid.

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 tales of his father's exploits. For Mr. Silva as well as for the boy, Captain Andrew Minas was a demigod.

There were long periods during which Paul yearned to be friendly with boys who knew how to make capital of his affection. And, although he learned to discriminate, he couldn't resist overtures. Those boys got his tops and marbles at scandalous bargains. But there was a definite limit to Paul's compliance and their knowledge of that fact created a margin of deference, even while they chafed under an authoritativeness they couldn't analyze. When the limit was exceeded Paul resorted to the umbrella expedient. How many times did he allow his feelings to be buffeted until, wounded to the quick by a heedless remark, he turned and pierced his victim with sharp words aimed at his betrayer's most secret weakness! An accomplishment that caused the victim momentary pain, dying away into vague spite, and Paul prolonged tortures of penitence.

His most reliable friend was Mark Laval, who was tabooed by most of the others. If Paul was freakish, he at least toed the mark in respect of manners and clean handkerchiefs, but his friend, two years older, was a ragamuffin with a shock of dusty hair, a great toothy mouth in an ugly face, and only a dog-like fidelity to commend him. Although Paul had always been conscious of Mark Laval as a sympathetic figure in his background, their friendship dated from a certain afternoon in his tenth year, when, on getting up from the piano he saw Mark seated under the cherry tree, chewing grass-stalks and dreaming. Strangely elated, Paul stole back to play his showiest solo, after which, on finding Mark in the same pensive attitude, he opened the door as casually as though he knew nothing of the other's presence.

Mark ceased pulling at the grass and looked up bashfully. As a means of breaking the ice, Paul slid down

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 the rounded surface of the wall at the side of the doorstep.

"Seen Uncle Tom's Cabin?" Mark asked.

Paul had no idea what Uncle Tom's Cabin was, and Mark explained that he had walked nine miles to see it performed in Dominion Hall at Bridgetown. He had paid ten cents for a seat. A man had given him the dime for carrying a bag.

Paul's Sunday-school teacher had impressed upon him the evil of theatres, her clinching argument being that a former President of the United States had been shot in one! He maintained a patronizing silence.

"I could show you what it's like, with little Eva and Legree and the bloodhounds," Mark offered, "if I had a pencil and some paper."

Paul glanced doubtfully at Mark's muddy boots, but in the end invited him to go round to the back porch, where he would meet him with pencils and paper and wax crayons, and they suddenly dashed off.

On the back porch Mark showed Paul what little Eva "was like." He also showed him what Julius Cæsar was like, and Boadicea and Napoleon and the boy on the burning deck. He gave them all Roman noses and crimson-lake lips, and portrayed them "eyes-right," with turrets and ramparts in the background. But they were very real to Paul by dint of their creator's intense, life-endowing belief in them, just as Paul's music had been very real to Mark Laval for a similar reason. On the strength of that common interest Paul suddenly realized that Mark was his friend. Simultaneously he was penetrated with a sense of the French boy's forlornness.

Mark had a father who came down from the lumber camps for whisky and vowed to kick all the nonsense out of his son. He was at school only because the authorities insisted on it. As soon as the law allowed, Mark's father planned to take him into the woods. With this destiny

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 before his eyes, Mark clung to the few bright opportunities that remained. Paul thought of his friend as a boy doomed to look at life through a window, a wild boy infinitely crude, yet infinitely gentle, his eyes reflecting passionate, wistful, vain enthusiasms.

Looking back on that friendship Paul was to recognize in Mark Laval the first person who set for him an example of the vigorous individuality of thought and expression that is unaware of what other people may be thinking and saying; his own furtive defiance seemed ignoble by contrast. With a Philistinism hard to conquer, he contemplated Mark's ragged clothes and thought of his squalid home, then, in an access of contrition, invited Mark to stay to tea. Aunt Verona made no objection, and Mark, after dutifully scraping his boots, found himself confronted by a mysterious array of china while his host mumbled a mysterious incantation ending in "Amen." He was abashed by his own mishandling of the spoons, yet so eager not to offend Paul and Aunt Verona that he seemed to be apologizing to them for the daintiness of Aunt Verona's taste, and she talked rather brightly to put him at his ease. When he had gone, Paul, for the first time in years, ventured to hug Aunt Verona without invitation.

Next morning, as he was leaving the house, he found on the doorstep a smudged, paper-bound copy of Ruy Blas. In the margins were sketches and annotations. On one page he read: "This ought to be sung." And Paul's mind danced for glee at the discovery that there were lyrics in the world which might be set to music. He had thought of songs as having always existed in an inextricable alliance with their music, like hymns. Trust old Mark to open his eyes!

On the title-page was this inscription: "For you to read and keep Paul. I'll never forget yestiddy." For a second Paul shrank. The Puritanism of countless for-

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 bears was responsible for a slight stiffening of spine at this friendly demonstration. His pendantism was revolted by the fault in spelling. Nevertheless he skipped off to school with more kindliness in his heart than ever before.

His alternative chum of this period was a boy of a conventionalized stamp. Walter Dreer's easy assurance reflected a definite social status which was substantiated by his father's victories at the local polls, and by the frosted walnut cakes that topped off his mother's Sunday-evening suppers. Everything about Walter was comfortably and infallibly bourgeois but his private thoughts, and these, as Paul later came to realize, verged on the lurid. Walter's prurience was an undercurrent against which Paul instinctively swam, cultivating Walter for his amiable laughter at one's whims and fancies, for his resourcefulness, his flexibility, his boundless information, and (since Paul was so generally isolated) for his popularity, which was in Paul's eyes a supreme distinction. Walter, mirabile dictu, approved of him, or seemed to, whereas he had always expected conventional people to disapprove or at the most approve with definite reservations. Above all, Walter constituted him the privileged audience for his best capers cut, as it were, for Paul's private amusement and in confident anticipation of Paul's rapturous applause—Walter, who had the whole village to choose from! Paul worshipped him.

Walter's cardinal deficiency was that he snubbed Mark Laval. Though Paul felt this to be unjust, he couldn't help being influenced by Walter's contemptuous opinion, and was guilty of treating Mark with less generosity than his instinct prompted. Moreover, in order to win Walter's fuller approval, he was at some pains to conceal his own

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 more glaring oddities, lest Walter might one day dismiss him too as a "freak."

For a year or two this comradeship was very close, being fostered by the fact that Walter, unlike Mark Laval, attended Paul's Sunday-school, which in a clannish community constituted an alliance. Then came a dark winter's day when Paul found Walter deep in the confidence of an enemy, John Ashmill, the son of Dave Ashmill who owned forests and gypsum mines, John Ashmill who had given Paul the nickname of "Polly" and always sang out, "Polly want a cracker?" when he hove into view. Walter was aware of the feud, and Paul was obliged to conclude that his chum was cultivating his enemy for the sake of the latter's liberal allowance and his superior sleds and skates.

It was a Saturday morning, a school holiday, and Paul had set off to find Walter, when he encountered him in company with his new playmate, a ribald despot with whom Paul supposed it was his duty to "mix," but on account of whose physical sense of humour he was carrying a scar on his temple, as well as more dire wounds that couldn't be seen. Paul greeted them without stopping, walking briskly towards nowhere. A solitary day lay before him, for Mark Laval had been taken off to the woods by his father, and Gritty was, after all, only half boy, and he had forsworn girls.

Then, at the corner, a malicious snowball burst upon his cap and penetrated freezingly into a corner of a stubborn young heart.

For six months after that he refused to speak to Walter Dreer, though they continued to meet in the street, and to sit in the same. It was a bitterly unhappy winter and he suffered for the sake of a principle which he secretly felt to be distorted. He was flatting and discording. Instinct told him that an uncompromising attitude always failed to prove itself justified. Yet he was

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 powerless in the grip of his stubbornness. Often he thought of confiding in Aunt Verona but another precocious instinct warned him that Aunt Verona herself was a victim of some similar fate. At night he wrestled long hours with his angel rehearsing conciliatory speeches, yet day after day he passed Walter without a sign, and became almost mechanically oblivious of his friend's existence, all the while mourning his loss.

During the first days of spring, in Paul's eleventh year, Dr. Wilcove took him for a drive to Bridgetown, where he had to attend a patient. This was an ecstatic occasion. Aunt Verona gave him twenty-five cents to buy whatever he chose and Dr. Wilcove added a "quarter" for candy. Fifty cents! Gee-rusalem! It was more than he had ever had to spend, even on Firsts of July. While Dr. Wilcove paid his call, Paul wandered through the river town inspecting the shops, and finally selected a green top, a dozen striped glass marbles, and a "real agate" shooter. With the candy quarter he bought a mouth-organ and a "souvenir" pen-wiper to present to Aunt Verona, whereupon Dr. Wilcove himself went into another shop and returned with a bag of sweets, which capped the glories of the expedition.

The return drive, past purple furrows and groves of shimmering green hazel, was an uninterrupted delight. The little mare knew she was homeward bound and ran cheerfully all the way. Dr. Wilcove let Paul hold the reins, and told him stories about the deserted farmhouses on his route, thrilling him when he pointed out the house in which his mother and Aunt Verona had been born. Then Dr. Wilcove, in that incorrigible grown-up manner, shook his head sadly and remarked, "It might have been as famous a house as Sam Slick's in its way!" Paul was too diffident to ask for an explanation, and the doctor's next remark, about "throwing away a career," got mixed

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Rh as of 7 July 2023.230 We identified 44 individuals and 37 entities that had been sanctioned—in one or more of these three jurisdictions—for their direct connection to the Wagner Network, or for relevant activities in support of Prigozhin. According to our analysis (presented in Appendix 1), the UK has sanctioned Wagner-linked targets at a lower rate than either the EU or the US. Specifically:

 * Among the individuals identified, the UK has sanctioned 15 of 44, i.e. around one in three (34%). In comparison, the US has sanctioned 61% and the EU 68%.

 * Among the entities identified, the UK has sanctioned 5 out of these 37 (13.5% sanctioning rate). By comparison, the EU has sanctioned 16 of these entities (43%) and the US has sanctioned 30 (81%).

Beyond these 44 individuals and 37 entities, the UK may have applied sanctions to additional targets, without making clear their association to the Wagner Network or to Prigozhin when doing so. When questioned on this point, the Minister appeared unsure as to why the UK may have sanctioned fewer individuals and entities than the US and EU, suggesting it may be because they are “larger”. He added:

"We work with our allies. If you have a list there that you think we should be seeing, I imagine that that list will be considered by our sanctions team."

Beyond these 44 individuals and 37 entities, the UK may have applied sanctions to additional targets, without making clear their association to the Wagner Network or to Prigozhin when doing so. When questioned on this point, the Minister appeared unsure as to why the UK may have sanctioned fewer individuals and entities than the US and EU, suggesting it may be because they are “larger”. He added:

In subsequent correspondence, the Minister disputed that the UK has sanctioned fewer people than the United States. However, the supporting statistics he provided referred to individuals sanctioned under the wider Russia sanctions regime, rather than those sanctioned specifically for their role within the Wagner Network. Appendix 1 provides our own list for the FCDO’s consideration. We acknowledge that there are specific reasons why the UK may have sanctioned at a lower rate than these allies.

47. The Government further implied that its limited sanctioning of specific Wagner-linked entities is irrelevant. It stated that its designation of the ‘Wagner Group’ in 2022 automatically freezes the assets of entities that the Wagner Group owns or controls.


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 up with a clucking noise destined for the ears of the little mare.

The afternoon was drenched as in a deep golden dew when they reached the brow of the hill over-looking Hale's Turning. Miss Todd's house came first into sight. Beneath it was the white Baptist church; opposite, the extensive acres of Dave Ashmill, bounded by a straggling cedar hedge. Farther on, the maples and elms and fruit trees of the village seemed to be growing in profusion out of a huge basket. The river lay beyond the roofs, mud-red, streaked with silver, broadening out toward the Basin. A wooden barque, her yards all criss-cross, rode at anchor near the mill. There were green stretches of marsh and pink mud flats too, and a shabby little train went rambling and rumbling across a trestle towards the long abandoned shipyard and rotting wharves that had been constructed by Paul's grandfather in the days when all vessels were made of wood.

As they descended the hill, with the warm sun in their faces, Paul had a strange sensation of ownership in this little village, so much more cosy and likeable than the bewildering Bridgetown for all its town hall built of stone, its brick schoolhouse, and a whole street full of shops. Bridgetown was vast and alien and unknowable, whereas Hale's Turning was almost his very own; he knew and for the moment loved every square foot of it. He knew and loved, as never before, every creature that dwelt in it. As they drove past the cedar hedge at the foot of the hill he felt he could almost have been friendly with John Ashmill, the bully who lived in such grandeur behind it. If only the little mare wouldn't trot so fast now!

Mr. Kestrell's windmill flashed in the sun. As they drove past the brown house, Paul caught a glimpse of Walter Dreer, walking along the muddy. His contentment took a more personal turn, leapt to a high

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 pitch. That Walter should see him driving in the doctor's rubber-tyred buggy was gratifying in the extreme. From the tail of his eye he tried to detect Walter's envy. Then they reached the big bare house, and it was time to thank Dr. Wilcove and say good-bye. Aunt Verona had rehearsed him in this final speech, and according to instructions he added, "Won't you come in, Dr. Wilcove, and have a cup of tea with us?" The doctor declined, patted him on the back in a way which made Paul suddenly wish he had a father, and drove off.

Paul lingered at the gate. He was still suffused in his sense of contentment, and his heart was beating strangely. He felt sure that Walter was walking faster now than when they had passed him. In a few seconds Walter would reach the gate. Paul pushed it, but as usual it stuck. The rusty hinges were as neglected as the garden. He gave a harder shove and dropped his bag of marbles. If he had been in a hurry he could have picked them up before Walter arrived. As it was, the shooter remained on the ground. Walter handed it to him with a curious, cajoling light in his brown eyes. The sun, shining on his eyes, gave them a resemblance to the shooter he was holding.

"Is it an agate?" he ventured, as Paul put it into the bag with the others.

Paul nodded.

"Get it in Bridgetown?"

"Yes," said Paul, and his sense of history in the making almost made him choke over the word—the first he had addressed to Walter in six months.

"Got any more?" Walter went on, swinging a jug which he was carrying to Mrs. Barker's for yeast.

"Only glassies," Paul replied.

"Let me see 'em?"

Walter praised the selection, and tried the green top, but the ground was too muddy for a successful spin.

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 He also ate a piece of candy, and smiled again. Paul was in the grip of emotions which made speech precarious.

"I'll play you allies after supper," Walter proposed. "For lends—not keeps."

"Got to practise. Been away all day."

"To-morrow, then."

"To-morrow's Sunday."

"We can play after Sunday-school, behind the schoolhouse. Nobody'll see."

Paul agreed and turned toward the house. Walter called him back.

"I'm sorry I chucked that snowball," he said. His eyes and his smile were evidence that it cost him little to apologize.

Paul stiffened. "What snowball?" he inquired. He knew the dissembling was lost on Walter, but he also knew that Walter would handle his pride with tact. Walter's tact in the old days had been one of the virtues that had made their relation possible.

"That day I was playing with John," he explained.

"What difference does it make to me how much you play with John?"

"He's awful stupid," Walter pursued. "I like you best."

"Then what did you put red ink on my sandwiches for?" Paul cried, with a hint of pent-up anguish, whereupon Walter again smiled his penitence.

"See you to-morrow, eh?"

Again Paul nodded and hurried down the unkempt path toward the house. Gee-rusalem!

There was much to tell Aunt Verona about Bridgetown and the little mare, and supper in the kitchen was a heart-warming meal. Aunt Verona listened kindly and was pleased with the pen-wiper. But she was dismayed when he put down his knife and fork in the middle of supper

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 and broke into uncontrollable sobs. He tried to explain, but failed. Then Aunt Verona's hands jerked, her face went white, and she made a remark which, by intriguing him, restored his self-control. "Happiness is such a rare visitor," she said, "that when it comes it finds us unprepared, It's good to be able to weep."

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Walter and Paul were more inseparable than ever, there was a new reserve in Paul's manner. In the bleak six months during which his pride had kept him aloof, he had strengthened his fortress. Now he peered over the wall and would not be enticed outside by anyone who had once succeeded in wounding him.

This economy of emotion, had he known it, lent a touch of the artistic to his personality, a touch which Walter had sufficient taste to appreciate. When Walter accused John Ashmill of being stupid, he had in mind John's lack of delicacy. The new Paul, more subtly sensitive than ever, faintly derisive at times, challenging, less gullible, obviously trying to discipline his own excess of gentleness, appealed to Walter's cajoling nature.

If Paul had spent the interval in learning arts of repression, Walter had not wasted his time. He had been acquiring stores of knowledge which his imagination had freely dramatized and which he was eager to display before an audience capable of appreciating fine shades. John Ashmill, among others, had put him on the track of discoveries which placed the universe in a new light. Hence at twelve Walter was in possession of all the information—and how much more!—that "a young boy ought to know."

He had absorbed these facts gladly, but to Paul the revelation came with an unutterable sense of horror. For Rh

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 years he was destined to struggle with Walter's facts before they would assume their right proportion. His lack of animal exuberance made it necessary for him to acquire an extensive new acreage of observation before the magnitude of the trees of knowledge could be dwarfed to normal. Walter was interested in facts per se—the more deeply dyed the better. Paul, even at the age of eleven, was interested in facts per the light they shed on the abiding rules of the universe. Night after night, his mind fevered with distorted images, he cursed his chum for having suggested them. For, more than any facts in his life, they seemed to fill the world with discord. Nothing had ever flatted as this discovery flatted. At first he refused to believe but there was no evading Walter's steady accumulation of proofs.

The matter was placed beyond dispute by Mark Laval. "Why, didn't you know?" the French boy commented, when Paul dared broach the subject. To Mark it was a truth as familiar as any other. His indifference had the effect of a cooling stream. If Mark, with his riotous imagination, could be so casual about the overwhelming phenomena of creation, there was surely some hope of a balance for Paul.

More jealously than ever, he guarded the margin of reserve in his companionship with Walter. For there were still dark wells in his chum's mind into which he steadfastly declined to look. He had learned new ways of keeping Walter in place. One of them was to cultivate Mark Laval. This was fair retaliation for Walter's association with John Ashmill, since Paul had agreed to drop his feud with the bully. Nothing humiliated Walter so promptly as a resort on Paul's part to French, which Mark spoke with a strong habitant twang. Walter understood not a word of what he enviously described as a "dirty lingo" and was brought to book by his sense of impotence, whereupon Paul's conscience troubled him at

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 the thought that he had yielded again to his besetting sin of showing off.

Paul's resentment of the new knowledge was at its sharpest when he attempted to reconcile it with the image of girls he knew. It made him sorry for nice girls and increased his dislike of horrid ones. He sincerely hoped Aunt Verona didn't know—though, being quite old, she might have found out by some unlucky accident. Of course all married people knew—Paul blushed—and writhed as the faces of Mrs. Dreer and Mrs. Kestrell came before him.

Walter's scheme obliged every creature to submit to or indulge in nastiness, and Walter found in such a predicament a source of glee! Whereas Paul now looked at his girl acquaintances with a haunting pity, as he might watch a lamb going up the path to the butcher, Walter chortled over the prospect of their fate. Not only that, but he kept on the alert for any sign of knowledge on the part of the opposite sex, and was never happier than when he detected Miss Todd coughing over an equivocal word in the Sunday-school lesson. He was highly pleased with himself when he perceived that Mrs. Wilcove was going to have a baby. "You wait and see," he concluded, when Paul refused to take his word for it.

A few days later when Paul called at Mr. Kestrell's workshop to sharpen his knife, he caught a glimpse of Gritty and Myrtle Wilcove in the showroom. Gritty was stuffing coloured tissue-paper into her pinny and presently began to strut about the room like an actor made up for the part of Falstaff. He heard Myrtle giggle, whereupon he suddenly blushed and fled, without waiting to sharpen his knife. A wave of knowledge seemed to have passed over the village like an epidemic. Trust Gritty to catch it!

The blow drove him out into the fields behind Aunt Verona's house. The only secrets left in the whole world

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 seemed to be the soft green cushions of moss studded with red pins that clung to the roots of the trees. For the first time in many months he thought of Leila, and was passionately glad that she, for one, had escaped the epidemic.

Gradually the new knowledge ceased to be a wholly discordant interruption in the theme of life. At times there were notes in this particular movement which still seemed to flat hideously, just as there had been chords in certain Chopin études which had begun by offending his ear, but which he had learned to incorporate into a wider musical comprehension. On one occasion, when John Ashmill boasted of having done indescribable things with his cousin Hilda, who lived in Halifax and went to a dancing school, the discord had been so great that it fairly drowned the theme. But by the time, a few months later, that Walter Dreer had come with a similar tale involving Bessie Day, a girl whom Paul had always thought of as dirty and bold, the class of facts of which Walter's exploit was an example had taken its place as mere ornamentation in the pattern, and the theme of life was repeating itself triumphantly above the questionable harmonies of this latest variation. Paul had reached the point where he could make sharp distinctions between phenomena such as Mrs. Wilcove's condition and Walter Dreer's immondices. The one was clothed in the miraculous, a little ugly, but necessary and condonable; the other was on a par with all the things in life one ignored.

Yet Paul was still under the spell of his chum. After all, there were long periods when the lurid subject was lost to view in the interest of games and excursions in the fields, and even when it recurred Walter could provide fresh details which filled out gaps in the puzzle. Moreover, Walter had become more discreet in impart-

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 ing his facts, had lived down his first gloating excitement. He found it more profitable to discuss the world within the restrictions which Paul's instincts made obligatory than with the licence made possible by John Ashmill's coarseness. For coarseness implied a limitation of ideas, the calling of spades spades, the ruling out of all the interesting gradations between black and white.

Although Paul saw with relief that his theme of life could hold its own under the intricacies of the new variation, he found that the upheaval of mind resultant upon the discovery of sex had made it necessary to take a new cognizance of other phenomena which he had never thought to challenge. It was as though van-loads of furniture had arrived at the door of his mind, installation of which could be effected only after a wholesale pulling down of partitions and the discarding of outworn objects. The upheaval had awakened his critical faculty, and he found himself watching the world with a growing scepticism and unprecedented shyness. He, who had been the hero of all the school-concert tableaux, now actually quaked when he walked on the platform.

It was at this period that Miss Todd offered him the post of organist in the church, a post made vacant by the marriage and departure of Miss Ranston. The rush of surprise and elation, a new sense of importance in the community, served for a time to restore his old trustful complacency of outlook. He had also increased his practising to four hours a day, and music absorbed most of his surplus energy, physical and mental.

But under the surface, speculation and mutiny were quietly smouldering, and the fond ladies of the village who pointed to him as a model of the Christian virtues and pagan graces were far from guessing the presence in his nature of anything that would make for a conflagration. Paul himself was just sufficiently aware of his own combustibility to keep raking sods over the smoul-

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text:
Barrochan Jean

 * "Barrochan Jean" in Cream of Tannahill's Songs (n.d.), a chapbook printed in Glasgow
 * "Barrochan Jean" in The Book of Scottish Song (1843), edited by Alexander Whitelaw

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 dering pile. In so doing he for a while deceived even himself.

It was impossible to say exactly when the image of Phœbe Meddar began to be a permanent tenant of Paul's mind. In the far-off days when he and Leila were monitors together, he had, in the thoroughness of his imaginative arrangements, thought of Phœbe as a sort of sister-in-law elect. And since the day of the funeral he had always been a little more sharply conscious of Phœbe's presence in the universe than that of other girls—with the exception of Gritty, the tomboy, who of course never counted. Gritty was a fixture in the universe like himself.

It was not until five years after the funeral, when Leila's memory had faded into the substance of a dream, that Phœbe's image became insistent. And not until a certain summer day when her name was mentioned by Walter Dreer did she leap into his heart with full significance. From that day, however, her personality revealed itself to him as something wondrously sweet, something that partook of the nature of violets and pansies and roses, as fragrant and as delicate.

He had never been close enough to Phœbe to ascertain whether she smelt of coco-nut cookies. Something in his regard for her made him refrain from approaching. For one thing, she had a sister who was an angel. It was as though Phœbe were a goddess who moved in a faery haze which he must not attempt to penetrate. Her brother might pull her golden pigtails and elicit musical squeals of pain and remonstrance, and Walter Dreer might talk about her as though she were like any other pretty girl, might even crowd into her corner of the Sunday-school vestry and roll his eyes at her, but for Paul it was an awe-inspiring privilege to live in the same

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 world as Phœbe. He gave humble thanks that he could see her walking on the opposite side of the road or know she was in the family pew hearing the music he made for her.

Often in the summer afternoons or before falling asleep at night he would be suffused with a sense of well-being that recalled the afternoon of his drive with Dr. Wilcove. And in all such moments a vision of Phœbe Meddar came before him, a tranquil vision in ivory and gold, with eyes of gentian blue and a little tight pink smile.

Phœbe was a year younger than he, and a grade lower at school. This gave him a sense of seniority. His regard for her was at times paternal, always protective. The heavenly hosts had lost their glamour. He was beginning to be sceptical of the pearl and jasper, the pavements of gold. There was something second-rate about the glory of abandoning a Bechstein concert piano on earth for a measly harp on high. But his nature still yearned after the ineffable, yearned all the more by reason of the disintegration of his heavenly visions, and before he knew it Phœbe was a sort of living angel in an earthly paradise from which he was excluded, but of which it was his lot to catch radiant glimpses.

The only sign that his regard for Phœbe bordered on the terrestrial was a growing dislike for Walter Dreer's society. He hated Walter when he spoke of Phœbe Meddar as "darn good-looking" or wondered whether Phœbe would be "game." Gritty Kestrell, champion of truth at any price, once said right out that Phœbe was Walter's "girl." Walter acknowledged the impeachment with an easy smile, for which Paul gave him another black mark. For he knew that Phœbe disapproved of Walter. He had seen her shrink when Walter had tried by ruse to obtain her as partner at Myrtle Wilcove's birthday party. The ruse had been discovered in time and the girls had finally drawn lots for partners and were

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 called into a room one by one and cross-examined by the assembly, whose duty it was to establish the identity of the partners by eliciting descriptive details in three queries. Phœbe, by some miracle, had drawn the slip bearing Paul's name, as he guessed from a sudden demure glance she directed at him, and he waited with studied negligence and wild pulses.

"What colour is his hair?" inquired the first questioner in the circle, as the assembly sucked their lead pencils in anticipation of guessing the name.

"Black," Phœbe promptly replied.

"What colour are his eyes?" demanded the next.

Phœbe was lost. She had to think. "Uh—blue. I'm not sure," she finally pronounced.

Paul's eyes were black as coals, but the vicissitudes of childhood had already inured him to the pain of wounded vanity, and his adoration was proof against his goddess's carelessness in matters of observation. Besides, from her pew she saw more of the back of his head than she did of his face. He quite forgave her shortcoming when, at the close of the game, she evinced no reluctance at joining hands with him for the "Ring around the Rosy." The outstanding fact was that she had avoided Walter, and yet Walter could smile confidently when Gritty spoke of Phœbe as his girl. The world was like that.

The night before the Sunday-school picnic Walter told Paul of a rose garden which flourished in the Ashmill grounds. He proposed that they make a raid on it. "Girls like 'em," Walter said vaguely. Paul waived his scruples in the excitement of adventure, and they set forth.

"You go and get 'em," Walter suggested when they stood before the Ashmill cedar hedge. "I'll be sentinel."

This was an irregular suggestion, since Walter had proposed the expedition. But Paul made no demur, lest Walter should suspect that he dreaded the dark. Walter

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 whispered directions concerning a particular bush of pink tea-roses.

"Get four or five," he instructed.

The grass was damp and the earth loose under Paul's feet. The grounds stretched darkly away toward the orange windows of the Ashmill house, partly concealed behind black clumps of shrubbery. He crept beside the bushes, starting at vague sounds. His nerves were prepared for anything that might come bounding out at him. A dog's bark would have been welcome, for it would have dispelled the weird silence. Walter would not have understood his fears—no other boy would have—only he was afraid of the dark, and no one in the world must ever suspect.

The air was heavy with a nameless blend of odours. He closed his eyes and pictured Phœbe Meddar, white and gold, blue and pink, fresh, cool and mysterious. The tea-roses were in the farthermost corner. Dewdrops ran down his sleeve as he cut the stems. Thorns pricked his wrists. One; two, three, four, and a lovely bud. It seemed a pity, but there were hundreds left. He stole back and presented his flowers in timorous triumph. Walter concealed them under his coat and they regained the road.

Before Walter's gate they made an arrangement to meet early in the morning, then said good night.

"I'd like to have the bud," Paul said, as Walter closed the gate.

Walter detached the bud from the bouquet and Paul ran home.

In the morning Walter failed to appear at the rendezvous and Mrs. Dreer said he had already gone to the post office, where the waggons were to start. With the and a picnic basket in his hand, Paul hurried to the post office. Among the boys and girls already assembled he detected the form of Phœbe Meddar. She

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 stood there with the pale morning light gilding her pigtails. Her head was bare, for Gritty Kestrell was trying on Phœbe's new leghorn hat trimmed with heliotrope ribbon, Gritty's passion for dressing up was one of the few weaknesses that betrayed her sex. Ever since she had seen Uncle Tom's Cabin she had shown a tendency to strut about as Topsy or Aunt Ophelia. She could also impersonate Miss Todd singing her solos, and was particularly successful as Pokey Ned, the village idiot.

Walter was playing marbles with Bob Meddar and Skinny Wiggins. Paul was about to hurry forward with his and slip it into Phœbe's hand while the others were watching Gritty's antics, when Phœbe leaned down toward her basket and picked up a bouquet that was resting on it—a bouquet of four tea-roses—and buried her nose in it.

Paul swung on his heel.

Aunt Verona was astonished to see him. She knew how eagerly he had been looking forward to the trip to Slate Beach and hoarding pennies for ice-cream.

"I'm not going," he said, and Aunt Verona took the basket without further inquiry.

"I tell you what," she proposed. "Let's you and I have a picnic all by ourselves in the field by the brook. I'll make some doughnut men and animals."

He acquiesced with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, for he realized that Aunt Verona, in offering to go as far as the field, was making an unprecedented concession to comfort him, and he felt he ought to support her effort. But in the playroom, with the door shut, he leaned forward on the keyboard of the big piano and wept.

Although Paul continued on friendly terms with Walter Dreer, he contrived to see less of him, and only his dis-

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 trust of his own stubbornness saved him from a repetition of the old wordless estrangement. During the remainder of the summer vacation he divided his time between music and reading. His progress in the former was becoming rapid as his hands grew broader, and the excitement of being able to play Chopin scherzos, which Aunt Verona assured him nobody in Hale's Turning and very few people even in Halifax could have played, made him willing to practise five or six hours a day. In consideration of this extra application he was relieved of all household tasks, and even abandoned Mr. Silva's cow.

Aunt Verona had had Mr. Silva bring down a crate of books from the attic to swell the list in the playroom. There were novels and collections of poetry in German and French and English, text-books on harmony, treatises in philosophy, books of memoirs—a stimulating miscellany. On the title-page of a beautifully bound volume entitled Confessions d'un Vieux Musicien, there was an inscription which read: "A la gracieuse Verona Windell, souvenir amical et affectueux de l'auteur, qui n'oubliera jamais ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne. A l'admirable artiste tout bonheur et tout succès!"

Here was a field rich in possibilities. Yet he knew that a direct question would merely have the effect of vexing Aunt Verona or driving her into one of her brooding reveries. It was thrilling to learn that Aunt Verona had known a musician who had written a book, thrilling to know that she had been a person of consequence in Munich and Vienna, thrilling to know that she had been thought of as an admirable artist. He knew that Aunt Verona could play superbly, though he had never heard her, except for occasional phrases when she was teaching him how to produce certain effects. It was all intriguing and heart-warming, and with glowing eyes he plunged into the volume, taking care to read it in the play-

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 room so that Aunt Verona's attention should not be attracted to the inscription on the title-page. It might arouse some disagreeable memory, and he wished to avoid that, for she had been unnaturally depressed for several weeks.

It was a dull book, except for the parts in which the author spoke of composing symphonies and travelling over Europe to conduct them. There were grand pages relating his triumphs, and touching accounts of his disappointments and the treachery of his colleagues.

Then there came a page of crashing, glittering splendour—a page that set Paul's heart beating and wrapped his immediate world in a magic scarf. For he read: "It was at this selfsame concert that the public of Vienna first heard the young Canadian pianist, Mlle. Verona Windell, who performed the Schumann concerto in a manner that aroused the highest pitch of interest and curiosity. This artist undoubtedly has a brilliant future. As for my own concertos, not even Clara Schumann has played them with a finer sense of proportion and a more appealing charm. Mlle. Windell is of that rare company of musicians who abandon themselves to the composition in hand, without trickery, without ceremony, so that it becomes for the moment the channel for the deepest reservoirs of feeling of which the human organism is capable. Such artists should never be constrained to interpret petty music. Their energies need to be conserved for the great works."

With the open book in his hand and his eyes as widely open as the pages, Paul passed down the playroom into the kitchen. It was all very well to repress one's wonderment about Aunt Verona on ordinary occasions, but this!

Aunt Verona paused in the act of wringing out a dish-cloth, and her face tightened as she saw the eager inquiry in Paul's eyes.

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 "What have you there?" she asked, coming to meet him and reaching for the book with wet hands. She glanced at the page, pressed her lips together, snapped the covers to, and placed the volume on the table.

"Aunt Verona—" Paul commenced tentatively, and waited.

"That's a silly book, child," she said, trying to keep a harsh note out of her voice. "I'd rather you didn't read it . . . Run out and play a while before the sun goes down."

Reluctantly, Paul left the room, giving an apprehensive glance over his shoulder at the crate on the floor with its scores of books in disorderly array. His apprehension clung to him out of doors, and he sat on a chopping block by the woodshed, wondering and wondering.

A few moments later his attention was caught by the changed colour and increased volume of smoke issuing from the chimney. He ran back and peeked into the kitchen. Aunt Verona had five or six books in her apron and was stuffing pages and bindings into the stove with the poker. She was muttering to herself, so engrossed in destruction that she failed to observe the intruder.

When the last volume in her apron was disposed of, she replaced the kettle over the flames, and Paul stole away to the woodyard, frightened, outraged, and sad. Life had gone terribly off-key again, and this time it was Aunt Verona who had deliberately played a false chord in her own theme. He was sure that many precious clues had been consumed in the flames, many an enchanting tale irrevocably pressed back by Aunt Verona's drawn lips. It was small consolation that thirty or forty books had been spared. None of them, he felt, would breathe any hint of a more personal significance than ordinary books; their title-pages would be without penned inscriptions.

One volume from the crate he had brought away in

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 his pocket, a tiny German book with small print and a miniature wall-paper pattern inside its flexible covers. It was called Die Leiden des jungen Werther. He found a comfortable seat on the pile of and began to read.

Paul's hopeless wonderment regarding Aunt Verona added to the weight of hopeless love for Phœbe Meddar and the weight of Walter's betrayal pressed heavily on his mind. Fortunately his long hours at the piano and organ, the choir rehearsals at Miss Todd's, and his literary treasure-trove gave him the opportunity of merging his perplexities in an endless stream of fancy. Music was the most satisfactory outlet. He could even imagine, for instance, that he was Mlle. Verona Windell, and that the chairs and engravings in the playroom were the rapt and gaping citizens of Vienna. A yellow silk handkerchief tied round his head unaccountably heightened the illusion.

Or, when that rôle palled, he could imagine he was a grown-up Monsieur Minas, playing sonatas which he had made out of his own head, and that his audience was Mlle. Phœbe Meddar, a charming young lady from Canada whose pale gold hair and heliotrope gowns were the admiration of swarthy foreigners. At the end of the piece, when Mlle. Meddar had expressed her approval and averted her violet-blue eyes, he would lean forward and whisper, "Ah, my dear Mademoiselle Meddar, I am going to write a beautiful book, and on the front page I will write an inscription to you. Never shall I forget our evenings together in Munich and Vienna."

And Mlle. Meddar would reply, "Oh, Monsieur Minas, will you?"

With the reopening of school in September, Mark Laval made his reappearance. He had shot up and

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 spread out, and in his coating of tan looked like some great shaggy dog. His eyes Paul observed for the first time—with a sudden realization of the oversight, he smiled subtly at his recent condemnation of Phœbe's carelessness with respect to his own eyes. One of the books in Aunt Verona's box had been called Les Fleurs du Mal, a series of poems for the most part incomprehensible. In one poem about a cat, he had been struck by the description of the animal's eyes—"a mixture of metal and agate." That was the quality of Mark Laval's eyes. They magnetized your gaze and then, like a clairvoyant's crystal, held it in focus. But unlike the eyes of Baudelaire's cat, Mark's eyes were kind and loyal, even when his words were unyielding.

Coming into Paul's lonely and abstracted mood, Mark was doubly welcome. He walked home with Paul after the first morning at school, which had been devoted to an announcement of the year's programme of studies. Mark, despite his bare thirteen years, was almost grown-up, and in his presence Paul felt small, yet singularly secure, as secure as he had felt with Mr. Silva. The summer in camp had increased the older boy's awkwardness, without diminishing his intensity. A certain moodiness, however, like a dark cloud, had settled over him, making Paul feel his forlornness more acutely than ever. It was to be Mark's last year at school, and already he foretasted the exclusion which withdrawal from his must entail for him. He was like a strong swimmer setting out towards the open sea knowing the waters must ultimately close over his head.

With a blunt thumb and a blunt forefinger Mark turned the pages of a characteristically grubby copy of Evangeline and read aloud from it. His voice and his belief in the poetry had the effect of transforming a singsong tale into a glowing apotheosis of sentiment. At school Paul had taken slight interest in the tame Acadian

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 lovers who had lived at Grand-Pré, only a few miles distant from Hale's Turning, but under the spell of Mark's enthusiasm the old Norman days came to life and reminded him of his hereditary interest in their fate.

"Has a funny effect on you, poetry," Mark ventured, when the book had been closed and they were seated under the cherry tree in Aunt Verona's orchard. "Makes you feel sort of—more alive but all weak and runny too."

"And sad," added Paul.

"But nice sad—not gloomy."

"No, not gloomy. It's like music, kind of. Makes you feel serious but excited—and ready for something to happen . . . which usually doesn't," he added with precocious cynicism.

"Like cryin' because you're happy, the way women do."

"Men too, sometimes."

"I never seen a man cry."

"Werther did—often."

"Who's he?"

"In a German book. He killed himself at the end."

"You stay in Purgatory if you do that."

"Oh, pooh! That's what the priests say."

"Well, they know."

"You think they do, you mean. There's another thing I read, in a French book, that said something about priests in poetry. I remembered to tell you. It said:

"Must a been a book of sin."

"Oh, you say that because you're narrow-minded. All Catholics are narrow-minded."

"Are they! What about you? You're narrow

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 minded for runnin' down Catholics. You think you're right about everything just because you're rich."

Paul was as snobbish as most boys of eleven, but he was also truthful. John Ashmill's father was rich, but to think of himself as rich was the height of absurdity.

"I am not," he contradicted.

"Yes you are," Mark insisted. "You own this house and a ship and the wharf and lots of things."

Paul laughed at his friend's ignorance. "My father did, but he's been dead ten years. He died at sea with yellow fever."

"Sure, and he left everything to your mother. When she died she left everything to you. There wasn't nobody else. It's all yours now."

"It is not." Paul had nothing to go by but a sense of the grotesqueness of his owning anything so big and useless. "He left me the gold watch that the queen gave him, but I'm not to have it till I can play the Liszt sonata."

"You ask Miss Windell."

Paul considered this. It would do no harm to ask Aunt Verona, and he certainly meant to. But he preferred to wait, for in the event of her saying yes he would lose the argument, which would be humiliating.

"I have to practise now," he finally announced.

Mark's appreciation of his music was the corner-stone of their friendship, and his eyes now dwelt on Paul in a sort of wistful envy, free from any taint of grudge.

"Can I stay here and listen?" he asked.

Paul melted. He could concede even an argument to such an eager friend. "Sure you can," he said, "if you want to."

"Play the Impromptu," Mark coaxed.

"The Schubert in A-flat?" Paul inquired. He couldn't resist this little parade of specialized lore.

"Yes—all runny."

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 "Oh, it's easy," Paul deprecated. "I know dozens of things harder than that."

"I like it," Mark insisted. "Play it—go on."

"It's rather monotonous—too much repeating."

He closed the door behind him with an elation he wouldn't have betrayed to Mark for worlds, and proceeded to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. Aunt Verona was mending stockings.

"Aunt Verona, Mark Laval says I own a ship and a shipyard. I don't, do I?"

She waited a moment, then replied:

"Don't let people put notions into your head. Here are some cookies before you practise."

Paul blushed. He was thinking of the notions Walter had put into his head.

At the open window of the playroom he tossed a cookie out to his friend, who was pulling at the grass. "You're wrong, Mark," he whispered, "about the ships and things. I asked my aunt."

Mark merely shook his head in indulgent contradiction, accommodating the cookie in two bites.

"Play the Impromptu," he returned.

The opening of the crate of books had consequences more far-reaching than Paul could have foreseen. From the day when Aunt Verona had consigned the souvenir volumes to the fire, the disconcerting blank moods had gained a new ascendancy. With increasing frequency and at the most unexpected moments she repaired to the playroom to stare unseeingly through the window. She confused the days, too, and spoke German oftener than French. Occasionally she disappeared upstairs and Paul, listening breathlessly, could hear the faint rumbling of drawers, the shutting down of boxes, the crunching of

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 keys in rusty locks. But Aunt Verona collected texts with the same meaningless precision, and there were now two drawers overflowing with the bescribbled scraps of paper.

As the winter advanced a new habit was formed. Aunt Verona took to writing at a furious rate on sheets of foolscap. At times her ideas lagged and she would sit staring at the paper in an abstraction which was proof against even the smell of burning bread. Paul found himself saddled with a new responsibility regarding the proper running of the small ménage. When Aunt Verona's ideas failed her, she would end by locking away the sheets of foolscap in the dresser. Perhaps five minutes later, as she was carrying a kettle from stove to sink, the recalcitrant ideas would come to her, whereupon she would abandon the task in hand, bring out the foolscap, and commence scribbling.

One evening after supper, when she had left her seat at the kitchen table to consult a dictionary in the playroom, Paul looked up from his arithmetic exercise and glanced at the sentences on her page. He succeeded in reading this:

"But Heinrich, though he could feel that one was an artist in every fibre, would never have understood how one might be so thoroughly and abysmally an artist as to be unable to succeed in art, once one's faith in one's higher ego were jeopardized. For him the fulfilment of an artistic aim would be gaged by public proclamation that the aim had been fulfilled, by public recognition of mere dexterity, or whatever. For the motto 'To thine own self be true' he would have substituted 'To the world's preconception of you, be true.' Art for him was a compromise between the individual and the community, just as his status was a compromise between the monarchical whip-hand and the grovelling of the masses, their willing or unwilling allegiance to his numbskull sire.

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 In a sense his myopia was less ridiculous than my idealism. He at any rate was under no illusions as to his inherent princeliness, whereas I most whole-souledly was. And my belief in his inherent princeliness, my devout, mad, piteous belief in it superseded and gradually strangled my belief in my singleness of purpose, in my—God save the mark—genius. He considered himself a prince because he was the son, the grandson, the great-grandson, the nephew, the cousin of kings, and for no other reason. For me he would have been a prince had I met him mounting guard at the palace gates instead of mingling with guests of State. Whereas had I come to him unheralded, with nothing but my belief in myself to support whatever grace God had given me and a French dressmaker had accentuated, who knows"

Aunt Verona's step cut short the surreptitious perusal, and Paul glued his eyes on his task. The ciphers swam, and the exercise became abracadabra. He wondered and wondered, until the mystery and the glamour emanating from the end of Aunt Verona's stubby pencil became a positive pain. His cheeks were flushed and his head ached. On the blurred page of his arithmetic, in the softly yellow circle of light made by the kerosene lamp, he saw a youthful version of Aunt Verona gowned in "white samite, mystic, wonderful," curtsying to a blonde youth in gold braid, with ribbons and medals on his breast and a gleaming sword at his side. He saw her pale and pretty, with the faint, serious smile modifying the austerity of her face, sitting at a long piano, while in curved ranks, beyond shiny spaces of floor, under millions of glittering prisms, flanked by mirrors and marble columns, in a warm flood of perfume, potentates and bejewelled ladies listened spellbound to the fabulous strains of the Liszt sonata. He saw the arms fall away from the piano, he saw the young artist lift a red rose from the lid and carry it to her lips, he heard complimentary mur-

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 murs and the patter of white gloves, he saw the blonde prince advancing across the shiny space

Suddenly he broke the spell and cast a furtive glance toward the end of the table. There was Aunt Verona, quite old-looking, over forty, her dark eyes burning, her face drained of colour, her lips tightly pressed together, her grey-streaked hair parted in a manner that recalled the picture of the lady who had written Daniel Deronda, her figure muffled in a green woollen dressing-jacket, her cramped, cold, scarred, veined, nervous, bony fingers racing across the page.

He got up from his seat and went to throw himself down on a sofa in the dark playroom. His departure was unnoticed. Life was vast and terrifying: a great stormy adventure illuminated by brief flashes which only accentuated the blackness. One would go on groping, always groping, for ever and ever, alone. An endless fugue that got harder and harder to play. One could not hope even to trace the line of the theme, much less master the intricacies of subsidiary voices.

To-night he knew he would have to keep his back pressed against the wall all the way up the dark stairs.

When Aunt Verona was not given over to the fever of writing, she moved about in a cloud, working mechanically, or staring through the playroom window at nothing. In bewildering sallies she emerged from her abstraction and returned to the old routine, making hot scones, mending stockings and mittens, sweeping, polishing, dusting, asking questions, and presiding over the early-morning music lesson. These intervals, however, found Paul unresponsive, for he had adapted his manner to Aunt Verona's growing impersonality and found it difficult to step out of his shell without warning.

Thrown on his own resources, he had become preco-

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 ciously self-sufficing, and as his mind became more and more stocked with images from books—books like Candide, Vanity Fair, Eugénie Grandet, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Last Days of Pompeii, Adam Bede, Hypatia, The Light of Asia, Knight Errant, The First Violin, Ben Hur—he found that life was changing from a fixed thing, as it appeared on the afternoon when he had driven into Hale's Turning with Dr. Wilcove, into a shifting drama, with ever new characters and settings. Even customs and institutions which he had always thought of as irreproachable, and in their nature immutable, he found were arbitrary. Everything under the sun, he made out, was challengeable.

At first this truth made him hold to his surroundings to see if he was steady. But as his critical faculty spread tentative wings a little thrill went through him, and he surmised that life was going to consist in an endless flitting, a long quest for the honey of truth, broken by intervals of recreation in the choicest flower-beds.

As a small child he had felt that all the security and permanence of life were harboured within Aunt Verona's kitchen and his playroom and bedroom. Now the gaunt old house was becoming an abode of ghostly ideas, and he saw it as a waning phase in the progress of his life, a single variation of the big theme, while a richer security, the culminating variations were to be sought outside this house, outside this village, beyond the farthest horizon. The value of life would be great or small in the measure that one's faring forth in search of its treasures were bold or timid. In exalted moments, moments when the truths buried in books came out of their graves to dazzle him with an astral radiance, he promised himself that he would fly carefully, but high and far. And his smouldering scepticism, the concealed sparks that ever gnawed at the roots of his daily habits, gave signs of bursting through in flame. So far the fire was known only to

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 himself, and he still made a point of raking dead leaves over the scorched roots. He was too conscious of his weakness to risk provoking opposition as yet, but the day would come—of that he was confident—and he went back to his books and solitary dialogues with renewed concentration.

The only outward sign of a growing self-reliance was a new indifference to companionship of the only sort available. Even his regard for Phœbe Meddar became a half symbolic sentiment which played the rôle of a kindly moon as contrasted with the burnished sun of his mental activity. He could dispense with the society of boys who had had little to offer in return for the painstaking efforts he had made to get on a footing with them. He no longer hovered on the edge of the circle. He drew a circle of his own, somewhat superciliously, and with a tinge of bitterness noticed that no one but Mark Laval sought the privilege of stepping inside its circumference—Mark whose value was largely discounted, even while it was enhanced, by his uncritical devotion. Not even Mark could reach the centre of the circle, and Paul often voluntarily stepped over the line, carrying his best ideas into a territory more accessible to his uncouth friend. In this act he was making a sincere attempt to live down an accusation of Mark's which he had at first resented; his wider reading had proved to him not only that he had been narrow-minded, as Mark had alleged, but that the gaining of the whole world was positively contingent upon his becoming broad-minded. He felt like a mole, burrowing steadily towards the light, yet still embedded in deep strata of inherited prejudice. His only tools were his critical claws, and he dug the more fiercely to sharpen them.

There had been some talk of his entering a Baptist preparatory school in Wolfville. At first he had favoured the project, welcoming the breath of adventure implied

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 in a change of scene and neighbours. On reflection it occurred to him that Wolfville must be only a sort of glorified Hale's Turning, that the very safety and regularity implied in Dr. Wilcove's partisan approval of the school in question augured ill for one's chances of finding therein companions akin to the stimulating people in books. Dr. Wilcove was kind but Dr. Wilcove was an usher and dearly loved that moment when it was time to get up and pass the plate—a moment which Paul had grown to despise. He had learned, aided, as always, by hints from Aunt Verona, that mere showing-off can become mortally dull and barren. He was suffering from the reaction of a long exhibition of virtuosity. Doxologies and postludes had grown sour, like milk, from standing still; his responses in Sunday-school had become parrot-like; his intimate relationship with the Holy Ghost was extinct. He could therefore muster little enthusiasm for the proposed school on the ground of its being a continuance of the traditions of the family set. Rather than sink into that bog he would shock the village by subscribing to Mark Laval's arguments in favour of the college of St. Francis Xavier. After all, what he objected to in Dr. Wilcove's proposal was precisely what Mark had objected to in his former cocksure assertions: namely, complacency and a casual assumption of infallibility. "Anything for a change," was his motto for the time being, but the change must be real and not merely apparent.

Becky States, the black washerwoman, had come to live in the house as general servant. Dr. Wilcove had insisted on the arrangement and the decision was arrived at one cold day in January when Paul had come in for his skates to find Aunt Verona flushed and strangely tense, in conference with the doctor. The latter was pre-

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 paring to leave, and while Paul was on the porch putting new laces in his skating boots he overheard their final remarks.

"But your nerves will have to pay for it in the end," the doctor was expostulating. "Neuralgia will then be the very least of your troubles. There's no such thing in nature as utter inflexibility."

"Nuns fret not at their convents' narrow room," Aunt Verona commented in a brittle tone.

"Ah, but you do fret without knowing it. It's like bleeding inwardly. Besides, you're the last woman who should ever have dreamed of turning your back on life."

"I gave it a trial."

"Not a fair one. You dived into a shallow pool, stunned yourself, then concluded that the pool had been deep and that you had been stunned through incompetent diving—which is grossly unjust to yourself. Since then, by disdaining little pools and shrinking from big ones, you've shirked the issues of life. Be warned while there's still time."

When Paul returned from skating two or three hours later, he paused at the gate, thinking he had heard the sound of a piano. But he doubted his ears, for they tingled from the cold wind on the frozen marsh ponds, and the sound might have been a distant sleigh-ball or the clinking of skates slung over his shoulder. He hurried down the icy board-walk to the kitchen door, stood still a moment to listen, then thoughthrough [sic] the window saw Aunt Verona lighting the lamp.

It was Friday night and he had to hurry through supper in order not to be late for choir practice. He was tired after the afternoon's exercise and would have preferred to sit at home with a book. He could play the silly anthems at sight and resented the necessity of going over and over the separate parts to accommodate tenors and contraltos whose musicianship was of the hit-or-miss

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 variety. Mr. Silva was the only member of the choir who invariably sang the right note. Even Miss Todd—whom Walter Dreer spoke of as "gurgling Gertrude"—fumbled for the notes when sight-reading and beat time with her head. There was one point—E or E-sharp—where her voice passed without warning from molten brass into brass wire, and if the finale of her solo called for a sudden jump to G-sharp or A she trembled for a moment like a distraught hot-water pipe, then emitted the same sort of pinched moan—sometimes painfully faint, sometimes squawkingly shrill, When her solos were written higher than usual, Paul mercifully transposed the music without her knowledge. He couldn't transpose the anthems, because then the bassos got beyond their depth; besides, Mr. Silva always knew when one took liberties with the key.

It was time Miss Todd gave place to a new soloist, but nobody had the nerve to tell her so, for she was sweet and gentle. Moreover, it was time he chucked his job, and some bright morning he would. Already he could hear the minister say in his oily voice, "Why, what now, my little man!" Little man—Gee-rusalem! In church, as soon as he had memorized the text, he fooled everybody by reading books behind a high choir seat—books that would have horrified the minister's wife.

Sunday-school was becoming intolerable too. Year in and year out, the same cycle of lessons and golden-texts, with an attempt to enliven the dreary proceedings by coloured cards and chalk pictures of lilies on the blackboard. Decidedly he had outgrown it, as he had outgrown everything else in this sleepy village. There wasn't a grown-up in Hale's Turning who had read books like Werther!

He was developing the habit of playing hookey. One morning, instead of going to school, he and Gritty had

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 pooled their savings, sneaked into the train, and gone to Bridgetown to see a thrilling matinée performance of Hazel Kirke. During the return journey they had stood on the platform and each smoked half a Sweet Caporal. Gritty had even suggested that they should run away and go on the stage.

As the winter progressed and the long thaw set in, Aunt Verona's time was almost wholly devoted to her manuscripts. Becky was in control, and her unearthly growls and rich baritone bursts of song brought an unaccountable note of cheer into the depression of the house. "Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile," Becky would drone as she scrubbed, and once Aunt Verona looked up to exclaim, with an old-time gleam of humour, "Mercy, Becky, what a gloomy tune!"

But Becky, who was a law unto herself, went on, de plus belle, "a long ways from ho-o-ome, a long wa-ays from home." It was plain to her, as it was to Paul, that Aunt Verona liked the song. Besides, Becky's lugubriousness was one of Hale's Turning's stock diversions. Its comic value was enhanced by the long glass prisms hanging from her ears and resting on her calico shoulders.

One morning in April, after weeks of wind and rain, a flicker of sunlight broke through the clouds and a breeze stole into the village with the news that Spring was coming. The trees whispered the message; the sparrows, eavesdropping in their branches, overheard it and flew up and down and around in excitement. Paul guessed it and ran out of the house, brandishing his book-bag and leaping high over the mud-puddles. Aunt Verona must have known it too, with the experience of many a barren change of season. She had spent a sleepless night and was suffering with neuralgia, an ailment of long-standing. When Becky had cleared the breakfast table, Aunt Verona went into the playroom and stood at the window to wave Paul the usual good-bye. The trees in the neg-

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 lected orchard were palely gilded. The clouds above were being rolled back like some billowing curtain in order that the sun might have full play upon the vast stage where the annual drama of creation was commencing. Over the fields there was a faint green halo of growth. In a few weeks the trees would be spilling over with leaves and blossoms; summer would come at one stride, then autumn with its fruits, and winter again with its blizzards and silences and delays—world without end, Amen. Nature was showing off to-day, Nature the virtuoso. The genius of God was putting to the blush anything man might hope to accomplish.

When Paul passed through the gate on his breathless return for dinner, he stopped short in amazement. This time there was no mistaking his ears, and he went around to the orchard side of the house and listened under the playroom window.

Great chords were tumbling forth with a profusion beyond anything he had ever heard. From the idiom of the music he recognized it as Beethoven, but it was as though the instrument—his child piano—had grown up and burst into song with the deep-throated voice of maturity. The music screamed, roared, rumbled, pleaded, wailed, grieved, sighed, and suddenly subsided to a singing plaintiveness. His heart was in his mouth as he listened, and tears stung his eyelids. To think of all that eloquence having been repressed for years and years and years, buried like the false steward's talent, like the precious books packed into crates, like the untold treasures locked in trunks and drawers!

The music broke off, recommenced, broke off again at the same point, recommenced, impatiently. Aunt Verona, he reflected, must be so badly out of practice after all the silent years that she found those mordents difficult. He could have played them—easily! Ah, but he couldn't have given the piano a soul as she had done.

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 At the same spot the music again came to a halt, then without warning a frightful jangling chord which seemed to have been struck with four or five hands at once was wrenched out, as though some gigantic claw had reached down and ripped the wires across the whole width of the piano. The cruel, thunderous discord made Paul jump. With a queer presentiment he stepped back from the window, hesitated, then ran around the house to the kitchen door. On opening it he caught sight of Becky standing agape, her eyes on Aunt Verona, who, with feverish energy, was snatching piles of manuscript from the drawer of the dresser and tossing them on the floor. When the last sheet of foolscap had been added to the pile, she thrust in the drawer and began to gather the sheets into her arms. Her manner reminded Paul of the day when she had destroyed the books, and he stepped forward apprehensively.

"Out of my way, child!" commanded Aunt Verona, pushing him aside as she proceeded toward the stove.

Her face! He was too astounded by it to be terrified.

He resisted and caught her arms. "No, no, Aunt Verona," he implored, in hysterical tones. "Please, please don't burn the story!"

His resistance was in vain. She had seized the poker and prodded up the stove-lid.

"Story!" she cried, with a harsh laugh. "Story! It's me—me! My cremation! There! There! There!" She fed the flames with one hand and poked at the burning pages with the other, while Paul succumbed to an overwhelming sense of impotence.

"It isn't right to do that!" he reproached in a despairing sob. "It's wrong!"

She gave no heed. Her eyes were glittering, her grey lips pressed together.

"Oh," he finally wailed, "I think you're mean, mean, mean!"

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 Something infinitely precious, something supremely vital had gone. It was as though one of his own limbs had been amputated. He recalled now something he had heard Aunt Verona mutter a few days back about her manuscript, about its being "wicked" and "futile." Life appeared for the first time menacing, sardonic.

Aunt Verona went upstairs to her cold bedroom, and Paul tried to eat some dinner, ignoring Becky's croaking, growling, throat-scratching commentary. Some instinct warned him to report the morning's happenings, and he called at Dr. Wilcove's house on the way to school.

On his return at four o'clock he found that his instinct had been more than justified. Becky's eyes were rolling and she was as incoherently voluble as some hybrid of dog and monkey. Mr. Silva was sitting in the kitchen, cap in hand, shaking his head solemnly, waiting, as he cryptically announced, until he was needed, and there was a note in the doctor's handwriting:

"

"Go at once to Mrs. Kestrell's and stay there for the night. Your aunt is very ill, but there is nothing you can do. I'll come and explain matters to you at Mrs. Kestrell's to-morrow. Show her this note, and say I'm relying on her kindness."

"Where is he?" Paul finally succeeded in saying, though his voice was faint and his mind nothing but an empty, buzzing box.

Mr. Silva jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the stairs. "You're not to go up," he said. "They've telegraphed to Bridgetown for the ambulance."

Paul supposed the "ambulance" was some especially

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 skilful sort of doctor. Into the blankness of his mind was creeping an old memory, long dormant—the memory of his mother tearing herself away in the night, heedless of his fears.

He couldn't trust himself to ask questions, could scarcely formulate any. With the note in his hand and his book-bag still slung across his shoulder, he left the house and turned up the road towards Gritty Kestrell's. He had never spent a night under any roof but Aunt Verona's, and suddenly a sort of awkward, despairing friendliness for the sinister old house clutched at him—despairing, for he seemed to be saying farewell to it, tearing himself away from it as his mother had done nine years ago. Something mysterious was transpiring in Aunt Verona's bedroom, something more ominous than mere sickness, for anything that affected Aunt Verona was somehow more ominous than phenomena affecting other people. He was sure it was the end of a variation. Nothing had flatted this time. A movement had just been hopelessly interrupted. And with its cessation he realized that he had loved it.

His eyes were drowning in tears and he trudged on, oblivious of the ruts and puddles.

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imperceptible degrees Paul had dropped from the head of his class to the bottom, and in June failed to pass his examinations. He was shocked at his failure, for it seemed to place him in the category of dunces, but he quickly relapsed into apathy. He had failed—well, what of it? Repeat the year? No fear! He was still himself, a person more important than any other, and he could be even more completely himself in some town like Halifax or Montreal or Boston or New York.

When the prospect of the vacation was hanging drearily on his hands, Dr. Wilcove drove up to Mrs. Kestrell's door one morning and asked to see him. In the walnut and horsehair parlour, with its paper roses and musty odour, Dr. Wilcove assumed an expression which Paul intuitively understood.

"I know what you've come to tell me," he forestalled. "You're wondering how you can break it to me. It's all right."

In his own ears the words seemed hard and stilted. But he was by no means as unfeeling as Dr. Wilcove momentarily judged, for he had already lived through the impending tragedy and had been preparing himself for this day ever since the doctor had first refused to let him see Aunt Verona. If it was true that she had been unable to move or to speak during all the long dragging weeks since she had burned her manuscripts, Paul felt Rh

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 it much more merciful that she should cease to live. The news which he read on Dr. Wilcove's countenance made it again possible for the boy to think of Aunt Verona with a sense of ease. Henceforth, for ever and ever, though he should not see her again, she would be with him in spirit as the old Aunt Verona, the kind, quiet Aunt Verona who sat at his side when he did his lessons; who made hot scones for his supper and doughnut men and animals; who called out from the kitchen when he got the time wrong; the Aunt Verona who said pungent things about neighbours with whom she never communed; who broke into odd, serious smiles when he said amusing things; who had solemnly taught him the way to accept invitations and lift his hat; the Aunt Verona who understood his pride and emotional intemperance; the Aunt Verona to whom he could explain his alien ideas; who confirmed his faith in the validity of his own impressions and encouraged him to formulate them honestly; the Aunt Verona who set a daily example of mental playfulness; who had made him realize that there was a feminine attitude toward phenomena which differed from the masculine; the Aunt Verona who inquired what his teacher had said to him, what Miss Todd had worn at Flora Ashmill's strawberry social; the Aunt Verona who had been very important when she was younger and who might have continued to be important but for some unkind defeat; who had lived a life romantic and distinguished beyond the guessing capacities of Hale's Turning; the Aunt Verona who never overlooked his faults yet who never made fun of him nor took an unfair advantage; who reproved and corrected but never scolded; the Aunt Verona who—who collected texts. And the thought of those poor useless scraps of paper stuffed pell-mell into the cabinet on the dresser, that irrational but methodically compiled jumble, that painstakingly memorized but mad record of three or four hundred sermons that even the

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 preacher had forgotten—this thought twisted his face out of shape, and Dr. Wilcove had cause to revise his hasty judgment and utter a little speech which Paul rather cynically prided himself on recognizing to be nicely adjusted to the occasion. He had long since acquired the habit of indulging grown-ups in their favourite attitudes, of playing down to their preconceptions of juvenility, of making responses that appeared to confirm them in their superior sense of fitness. Dr. Wilcove would have been put out, could he have known with what accuracy his young ward had, in his own mind, fore-echoed his words and the gravity of his tone.

The preparations for the funeral meant very little to Paul. He had not even flinched when he had suddenly realized why Mr. Kestrell was so busy in his workshop. He had a strange conviction that Aunt Verona was now, in some inexplicable manner, getting her second opportunity, that the empty years were being made up to her. He was equally sure that she was not languishing in that silly Sunday-school-card paradise in which he had once believed—as he had believed in Santa Claus.

And when the mealy-mouthed minister said at the funeral service that Verona Windell was now in the presence of her Maker, Paul squirmed in his seat and longed to yell hot denials of the ineptitude. He knew Aunt Verona would never have wished to go to what the minister spoke of as her Maker, and he knew that Aunt Verona was now where she had wished to be. The minister was getting it all crookedy. Who was he, to take smug charge of such a delicate ceremony!

As "chief mourner" Paul felt a sense of importance which soon left him, for he passionately resented the spirit of the proceedings. Why had all these people come? Curiosity? The minister spoke of "one whom some of you here gathered were privileged to see growing up as a girl amongst you." Yes, but if Aunt Verona

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 had finally come back to them and for years and years steadfastly refused to receive them, what right had they to intrude now? They had been privileged to see her growing up because she was only a child and couldn't prevent it; but they hadn't been privileged to see her after she had grown up, and Paul begrudged the posthumous invasion upon her privacy. He had almost snarled when the villagers had walked past the ebony box and peered through the little window at Aunt Verona's wasted face.

Had Dr. Wilcove been gossiping? Did those farmer cousins from Upper Bridgetown know something of Aunt Verona's life abroad? Or was the minister guessing when he spoke glibly of "brilliant promise" and "voluntary retirement to a life of piety and seclusion" And why spoil it all by calling poor Aunt Verona "one of the 'Lord's handmaidens?" He pictured the twisted smile with which Aunt Verona would have received that description. He heard her saying, "Me, Verona Windell, a handmaiden of the Lord God! Well, well—poor God! You mustn't say that word, child—I can but you mustn't—promise!" Then she would have gone to the playroom and sat looking out of the window. Aunt Verona might conceivably be the handmaiden; but to think of her as one of the handmaidens, standing with a group of others, wearing the same robes, indistinguishable from them, her grey-black hair down her back—it was grotesque.

Not only did he scorn the minister, but he bore a grudge against the ecclesiastical machinery that had inculcated such untenable notions. Recalling the days when he had seen a tiny replica of hell in the red coals over which Aunt Verona had braised onions to cure his colds, he felt extravagant compassion for that child who had been so needlessly terrified, and extravagant anger against the Man of God who so obtusely lied—yes, lied, whether he meant to or not. Ass! And the service went on and on.

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 Gurgling Gertrude—dear old thing, with tears in her eyes—was singing "Abide with Me."

Suddenly a flash of understanding came to him. Out of the dim past he recalled a phrase of Aunt Verona's which now explained much. "You must always try to listen to the sermon, child, and believe all they tell you in church. It was your mother's wish." That was it! That was why Aunt Verona had never checked his piety; that explained her queer smiles and reticences and sighs and head-shakes; that was why she could say "God" and he couldn't—because of some dying injunction of her sister's! The loyalty of Aunt Verona—and the unquestioning faith of his poor mother! It was beautiful that his mother had believed in all these notions. They ceased to be silly when she believed in them; they only became so when it was a question of his own mind. Aunt Verona had known better. And now he would, gradually, have to think back through his whole life and make a new allowance for the fact that Aunt Verona had been under a handicap regarding the free expression of her views. Was that, perhaps, why she had made him memorize texts? He was glad of his mother's injunction, glad that Aunt Verona had dutifully fulfilled her compact in so far as she was able, glad that he was free to disbelieve for himself now that Aunt Verona's stewardship was at an end and he was—well, scarcely grown-up, but very old for his age—much older than other boys of twelve, almost old enough to commence that vague adventure which he had often discussed with Aunt Verona.

The day on which Aunt Verona had burnt her manuscript had been a milestone in his experience. Her act had turned the key in a lock of desire. She had destroyed his only clue to romantic and adventurous living; therefore he must plan to see for himself all the marvels he and Aunt Verona had talked about, do all the marvels she and he knew there were to be done. She could have

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 done them—had indeed commenced, then stopped. He must go on alone, pretending she was at his back to suggest and encourage, to call out whenever he skipped a note or got the time wrong. Dr. Wilcove had said Paul reminded him of his aunt, and Paul was shrewd enough to notice that the remark had been made when he was in a rebellious mood. Through the haze of memory there came a ring of revolutionary spears against conventional bucklers. It came in the form of daring epigrams muttered by Aunt Verona which, though incomprehensible, had lingered for future consideration. Dr. Wilcove's remark gave him not only a clue to himself, but a clue to Aunt Verona. They were bold pioneers, he and Aunt Verona. The minister said that the meek should inherit the earth. The meek! What had the meek minister inherited, or the meek Miss Todd? Mr. Silva was meek and had inherited more than all the others, though he was one of the poorest men in the village—but his inheritance, which was an inheritance of understanding and common sense, he had brought with him—from Portugal! And he enjoyed his heritage in spite of his meekness, rather than by reason of it. Mr. Silva could have been an adventurer; indeed when he had been ship's carpenter on the Brandywine he had been an adventurer, serving under a very prince of adventurers, who had roamed the world over, who had saved Dutch sailors from a burning ship in an Atlantic hurricane, and brought Aunt Verona one of the finest pianos in all Germany.

To the minister Paul announced that he would like to resign his post as organist. His only excuse was "Under the circumstances," but he advanced it so adroitly that the minister had no choice but to look and say:

"Well, my little man, you've done a splendid work for the Master, and we shall sorely miss your help. I trust that when the next few weeks have brought comfort and blessing, you will be ready to resume the post again."

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 "No fear!" Paul vowed to himself. Never, never, never. But all he said was, "Thank you."

That night when, after saying good night to Gritty and her parents in the kitchen, he took his candle and went up the steep back-stairs to the "spare bedroom" that had become his makeshift home, his loss came to him in a blinding flash, which for an instant illuminated his life then left him in darkness. Never again would he experience the sense of safety and protection he had known ever since he could remember. From now on, nothing stood between him and the buffetings of life but his own puny will and the clumsy if well-meaning kindness of strangers who chanced to take a liking to him. For a moment he stood on the stairs while the candlelight cast wavering shadows which hideously dwarfed him. The moment seemed an eternity, for with his sudden serenity of thought and feeling the very universe stood still.

The slamming of an outer door caught him out of his thrall and he mounted the remaining steps.

Mrs. Kestrell was kind to him—kind and stupid. She had a rather absurd respect for his talents and good manners and always gave him a white linen table-napkin, whereas Gritty's was of crash with a pink border. While he secretly shared Mrs. Kestrell's respect for himself, he was ashamed of the feeling and disliked to use finer linen than Gritty. Not that Gritty minded, for she was a good sport. Besides, if Gritty had been piqued she would have gone straight to the cupboard and helped herself to the best table-napkin in the house. He preferred the rôle of quite ordinary boy. If you were treated as a quite ordinary boy you could surprise people by occasional revelations of superior wisdom, and it was amusing to surprise people; whereas if you were treated as a superior being you were cramped and intimidated by the consciousness that you must do nothing inferior, and in lots of ways

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 you really were inferior—football, for instance. The deference of Mrs. Kestrell, the pats and endearments of Miss Todd, and the practical solicitude of Dr. Wilcove were in a sense more embarrassing than indifference would have been. Their kindness only blurred the edges of his problem, and he had never been more in need of keeping the edges sharply defined.

The condolence of Phœbe Meddar was the sweetest of all. She saw him at Gritty's gate, crossed the road and stopped before him, then said, shyly but sincerely, "I'm sorry about your auntie, Paul; and I missed your playing in church last Sunday." That was the most delicate manifestation of sympathy and the most thrilling recognition of his musical importance that had ever been vouchsafed to him, but, after all, it was only a negative offering to a boy whose whole attention must be concentrated on putting together the puzzle-pieces of his disrupted life. And Phœbe's little offering summed up the whole of Hale's Turning. Hale's Turning took the trouble to be sorry because he cut a picturesque figure. He could not do much with its sorrow, still less with its white linen table-napkins and its plans to enfold him within the bigoted traditions of its life. He was obsessed with a desire to escape, to go where he could see only strange faces, hear only strange voices, move among people who had never even heard of Hale's Turning and its sleepy ways, people whose ideas were fresh and exciting and drawn from rich sources. He wanted to leave his old self—the self that had somehow been laid to rest in the graveyard—and set out in search of a new self, to wander, if necessary, to the very edge of the world in search of it.

If anything had been needed to tip the scale more sharply on the side of rebellion, the effect was accom-

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