“Where on earth have we got to now?” I said.

“Nowhere ‘on earth,’” said Amroth.  “You are at school again, and you will find it very interesting, I hope and expect, but it will be hard work.  I will tell you plainly that you are lucky to be here, because if you do well, you will have the best sort of work to do.”

“But what am I to do, and where am I to go?” I said.  “I feel like a new boy, with all sorts of dreadful rules in the background.”

“That will all be explained to you,” said Amroth.  “And now good-bye for the present.  Let me hear a good report of you,” he added, with a parental air, “when I come again.  What would not we older fellows give to be back here!” he added with a half-mocking smile.  “Let me tell you, my boy, you have got the happiest time of your life ahead of you.  Well, be a credit to your friends!”

He gave me a nod and was gone.  I stood for a little looking out rather desolately into the plain.  There came a brisk tap at my door, and a man entered.  He greeted me pleasantly, gave me a few directions, and I gathered that he was one of the instructors.  “You will find it hard work,” he said; “we do not waste time here.  But I gather that you have had rather a troublesome ascent, so you can rest a little.  When you are required, you will be summoned.”

When he left me, I still felt very weary, and lay down on a little couch in the room, falling presently asleep.  I was roused by the entry of a young man, who said he had been sent to fetch me:  we went down along the passages, while he talked pleasantly in low tones about the arrangements of the place.  As we went along the passages, the doors of the cells kept opening, and we were joined by young men and women, who spoke to me or to each other, but all in the same subdued voices, till at last we entered a big, bare, arched room, lit by high windows, with rows of seats, and a great desk or pulpit at the end.  I looked round me in great curiosity.  There must have been several hundred people present, sitting in rows.  There was a murmur of talk over the hall, till a bell suddenly sounded somewhere in the castle, a door opened, a man stepped quickly into the pulpit, and began to speak in a very clear and distinct tone.

The discourse—­and all the other discourses to which I listened in the place—­was of a psychological kind, dealing entirely with the relations of human beings with each other, and the effect and interplay of emotions.  It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been obscure.  There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body on the soul and of the soul on the body.  It came upon me with a shock of surprise that while