It was a grey day, threatening with rain which might mean ruin to the cut corn waiting to be stacked in the great arishmows that always seemed to Ishmael like the tents of some magic host.  All the way up from the Vicarage, which lay a couple of sloping miles away, his thoughts and hopes were busy, triumphing over the greyness and the faint damping mist that blew in from the sea like smoke.  For, somehow, after last night, he expected everything to be “different.”  How, he hardly knew; but for the first time in his life he had been allowed to be himself—­more, himself had been discovered to be Somebody.  True, there had been that mortification at supper which gave him what felt like an actual physical hollow in his chest when he thought of it, but after that the Parson had set him up and everyone had cheered him, and Archelaus had not dared do anything to spoil it.  He had been called “the little master”—­well, if last night, why not to-day?  Katie would probably be cleaning up when he arrived, but she would see him and call out.  “Here’s the little master come back!” ... and his mother would ask him whether he would like a piece of cake.  So he went on planning, after the dramatic manner of all imaginative children.  He would be very nice to them all, but he too would be different, now that he knew who he was.  For the Parson, finding him intensely puzzled, had partially explained to him that morning.  Questions of legitimacy, and any reflection on his mother, Boase had omitted for the time being, merely telling him that when he was grown up Cloom would be his because his father had willed it so.  He tried to impress on Ishmael that usually the eldest son inherited everything, and so it was natural that Archelaus should feel hurt about it.  At first Ishmael, with the quick generosity of his age, had wanted to give Cloom up to his brother there and then, but the Parson talked gravely to him, impressing on him for the first time what was to be the keynote of his teaching, that never, never must he forget that Cloom was the great trust of his life.  What he made of Cloom was everything; he could not shift this thing God had put upon him.  Thus the Parson, to whom what he was to make of Ishmael had become the absorbing passion of his own life.

Boase made Ishmael promise not to let anyone know he had been told about it; that, too, was part of the trust—­that Ishmael should prepare himself in secret, by diligent study, for this thing that was to be his.  The child promised, proud of the confidence, his imagination thrilled by the romance that had come to him, and so, although he meant to be quite nice to everyone, there was a tinge of kindly pity in the manner he pictured himself displaying when he arrived home.  And, overriding even these plans for the immediate future, was a tingling sense of glory he had never known before, the glory of this trust that was to fill his life....