like, especially at first—­John was going to be utterly wretched, miserably homesick, bullied, kept in over horrible sums and impossible Latin exercises, ill-fed, and trodden upon at games.  They did not really believe these things—­they knew that their brother, Tom, had always had a most pleasant time, and John was precisely the type of boy who would prosper at school, but they indulged, just for this fortnight, their romantic sentiment, never alluded in speech to school and its terrors, but by their pitying avoidance of the subject filled the atmosphere with their agitation.  They were working things for John—­May, handkerchiefs, and Clare, a comforter; their voices were soft and charged with omens, their eyes were bright with the drama of the event, as though they had been supporting some young Christian relation before his encounter with the lions.  John hated more and more and more.

But more terrible to him than his sisters was his mother.  He was too young to understand what his departure meant to her, but he knew that there was something real here that needed comforting.  He wanted to comfort her, and yet hated the atmosphere of emotion that he felt in himself as well as in her.  They ought to know, he argued, that the least little thing would make him break down like an ass and behave as no man should, and yet they were doing everything....  Oh, if only Tom were here!  Then, at any rate, would be brutal common-sense.  There were special meals for him during this fortnight, and an eager inviting of his opinion as to how the days should be spent.  On the last night of all they were to go to the theatre—­a real play this time, none of your pantomime!

There was, moreover, all the business of clothes—­fine, rich, stiff new garments—­a new Eton jacket, a round black coat, a shining bowler-hat, new boots.  He watched this stir with a brave assumption that he had been surveying it all his life, but a horrible tight pain in the bottom of his throat told him that he was a bravado, almost a liar.

He found himself, now that the “twenty-third” was gaping right there in front of him, with its fiery throat wide and flaming, doing the strangest thing.  He was frightened of the dusk, he would run through the passage and up the stairs at breathless speed, he would look for a moment at the lamp-lit square with the lights of the opposite houses tigers’ eyes, and the trees filmy like smoke, then would hastily draw the curtains and greet the warm inhabited room with a little gasp of reassurance.  Strangest of all, he found himself often in the old nursery at the top of the house.  Very seldom did any one come there now, and it had the pathos of a room grown cold and comfortless.  Most of the toys were put away or given to hospitals, but the rocking-horse with his Christmas-tree tail was there, and the doll’s-house, and a railway with trains and stations.

He was here.  He was saying to himself:  “Yes, it was just over there, by the window, that He came that time.  He talked to me there.  That other time it was when I was down by the doll’s-house.  He showed me the smoke coming up from the chimneys when the sun stuck through, and the moon was all red one night, and the stars.”