Hilaria was at present going through a phase of “trying to be good,” as the bishop was coming to hold a confirmation, and only those accounted worthy were to be confirmed.  Her goodness was of that healthy elastic kind natural to children, which never prevents them doing what they wish, because they instinctively keep it in a compartment to itself.  There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of honour to be “done” together.  Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness of her age in it.  She was nearly sixteen, several months younger than Ishmael, who was now just over that age, and who, owing to the reputation for seriousness his secretiveness had earned for him, was one of the candidates undergoing preparation with Old Tring.  He had apparently outgrown his fits of unbalanced talkativeness, and had become, with the difficult years, one of those boys who speak with almost comical rarity, and then with unemotional gruffness.  This power of reticence never fails to win respect, if of a half-irritated, half-resentful order, and Ishmael held a certain position in the school.  Also as the ward of a parson he was supposed to “be good” and know about such things as confirmations.  As a matter of fact, he considered his own Tractarian principles, rigidly inculcated by Boase, as superior to the mild evangelical platitudes of Old Tring, and plumed himself accordingly.  He was just at that dangerous age, reached somewhat later in the healthy normalities of school than it would have been had he stayed eating his own thoughts at Cloom, when religion either falls away entirely from a boy or flares up into a sudden vitality.  Ishmael’s blood ran with too much of inherited aptitude for prayer for the former pitfall to ensnare him, but the latter yawned beside him now and he thrilled to its attractions.  Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity.  It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed, while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as birds.  Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he would call it love.

Spring was in the low-browed room at the “George,” pouring in at the long windows and spilling in pools of hazy yellow upon the polished boards.  Spring was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter’s shining.  The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air.  Ishmael’s keen eyes could see how a