For was not he about to accept the said invitation in its fullest and most practical expression?  Witness the fact that, earlier in the day, he had deposited his heavy baggage at that house of many partings, many meetings, Radley’s Hotel, Southampton; and journeyed on to Marychurch with a solitary, eminently virgin, cowhide portmanteau, upon the yellow-brown surface of which the words—­“Thomas Clarkson Verity, passenger Bombay, first cabin R.M.S. Penang”—­were inscribed in the whitest of lettering.  His name stood high in the list of successful candidates at the last Indian Civil Service examination.  Now he reaped the reward of past endeavour.  For with that deposition of heavy baggage at Radley’s the last farewell to years of tutelage seemed to him to be spoken.  Nursery discipline, the restraints and prohibitions—­in their respective degrees—­of preparatory school, of Harchester, of Oxford; and, above all and through all, the control and admonitions of his father, the Archdeacon, fell away from him into the limbo of things done with, outworn and outpaced.

This moved him as pathetic, yet as satisfactory also, since it set him free to fix his mind, without lurking suspicion of indecorum, upon the large promise of the future.  He could give rein to his eagerness, to his high sense of expectation, while remaining innocent of impiety towards persons and places holding, until now, first claim on his obedience and affection.  All this fell in admirably with his natural bent.  Self-reliant, agreeably egotistical, convinced of the excellence of his social and mental equipment, Tom was saved from excess of conceit by a lively desire to please, an even more lively sense of humour, and an intelligence to which at this period nothing came amiss in the way of new impressions or experiences.

And, from henceforth, he was his own master, his thoughts, actions, purposes, belonging to himself and to himself alone.  Really the position was a little intoxicating!  Realizing it, as he sat in the somewhat stuffy first-class carriage, on that brief hour’s journey from Southampton to Marychurch, he had laughed out loud, hunching up his shoulders saucily, in a sudden outburst of irrepressible and boyish glee.

But as the line, clearing the purlieus of the great seaport, turns south-westward running through the noble oak and beech woods of Arnewood Forest, crossing its bleak moorlands—­silver pink, at the present season, with fading heather—­and cutting through its plantations of larch and Scotch fir, Tom Verity’s mood sobered.  He watched the country reeling away to right and left past the carriage windows, and felt its peculiarly English and sylvan charm.  Yet he saw it all through a dazzle, as of mirage, in which floated phantom landscapes strangely different in sentiment and in suggestion.—­Some extravagantly luxuriant, as setting to crowded painted cities, some desert, amazingly vacant and desolate; but, in either case, poetic, alluring, exciting, as