There was only a very poor train service, so my brother had plenty of time to walk back to the station, and it was settled that I should go part of the way with him.  As we walked along the white road, that stretched between uniform hedgerows of a shadowy greyness, I saw that he had something on his mind.  In this hour of my trial I was willing to forget the past for the sake of talking for a few minutes with some human being whom I knew, but he returned only vague answers to my eager questions.  At last he stopped in the middle of the road, and said I had better turn back.  I would liked to have walked farther with him, but I was above all things anxious to keep up appearances, so I said goodbye in as composed a voice as I could find.  My brother hesitated for a minute; then with a timid glance at heaven he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out half a crown which he gave me, and walked rapidly away.  I saw in a flash that for him, too, it had been an important moment; he had tipped his first schoolboy, and henceforth he was beyond all question grown up.

I did not like him, but I watched him disappear in the dusk with a desolate heart.  At that moment he stood for a great many things that seemed valuable to me, and I would have given much to have been walking by his side with my face towards home and my back turned to the grey and unsavoury town to which I had to bear my despondent loneliness.  Nevertheless I stepped out staunchly enough, in order that my mind should take courage from the example of my body.  I thought strenuously of my brother’s stories, of my play-box packed for a voyage, of the money in my pocket increased now by my eldest brother’s unexpected generosity; and by dint of these violent mental exercises I had reduced my mind to a comfortable stupor by the time I reached the school gates.  There I was overcome by shyness, and although I saw lights in the form-rooms and heard the voices of boys, I stood awkwardly in the playground, not knowing where I ought to go.  The mist in the air surrounded the lights with a halo, and my nostrils were filled with the acrid smell of burning leaves.

I had stood there a quarter of an hour perhaps, when a boy came up and spoke to me, and the sound of his voice gave me a shock.  I think it was the first time in my life a boy had spoken kindly to me.  He asked me my name, and told me that it would be supper-time in five minutes, so that I could go and sit in the dining-hall and wait.  “You’ll be all right, you know,” he said, as he passed on; “they’re not a bad lot of chaps.”  The revulsion nearly brought on a catastrophe, for the tears rose to my eyes and I gazed after him with a swimming head.  I had prepared myself to receive blows and insults with a calm brow, but I had no armour with which to oppose the noble weapons of sympathy and good fellowship.  They overcame the stubborn hatred with which I was accustomed to meet life, and left me defenceless.  I felt as if I had been face to face with the hero of a dream.