“Don’t worry, Ishmael,” she said.  “Father has often told me of people hurting their backs wrestling and doing things like that, and he says it’s very seldom anything.  If it is they can’t walk at all, and he walked quite well.  Besides, I know he’s pretending it’s worse than it is to upset you; he’s that sort....”

Ishmael felt a little pang of gratitude, he gripped her hand, muttered a “good-night,” and was off through the darkness.  But he did not go back to the school for an hour yet.  He was in for such trouble an hour more or less after time made no difference, and he was past thinking in terms of the clock.  He had grown up violently and painfully in a short space, and ordinary methods of measuring time mean very little to one who has crowded years of growth into one evening.  He walked about the moor till physical exhaustion drove him in, where Old Tring, with a glance at him, gave him hot brandy and water and sent him to bed with hardly a word.  Not till next day did Ishmael notice he was lame in one knee.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WIND UPON THE GRASS-FIELD

A week after the fight Ishmael went over the moor to the sea.  Everything was very still, even his footsteps were soundless on the thick turf.  It was one of those days filled with a warm mist, so fine it cannot be observed near at hand, but always seeming to encircle the walker, as though he carried some charm to make a hollow space around him where the breath of the mist may not live.  Yet, out in it for long, the clothes become sodden, while every grass-blade and leaf can be seen to hold its burden of a glittering drop, though the earth itself remains dry and powdery and on the hard, pale roads the dust lies all day, as though the actual soil were not of the texture to respond to a mist so fine.

Not a breath blew the vaporous clouds in the wreaths that usually change shapes while one watches, and the long drifts in the valley at Ishmael’s feet hung motionless in the air, the dark side of the opposite slope showed here and there, crossed by the pale zig-zag of the path.  He went on to the cliff’s edge; far below at its foot the sea, lost further out, was visible, motionless and soundless, save for the faint rustle where it impinged upon the cliff in a narrow line of white.  No outward pull or inward swell of the sea’s breast was visible; it was as though that fine edge of murmurous whiteness were always made of the same particles of water, hissing perpetually along the cliff’s foot.

Ishmael lay down on the damp young bracken and listened to the stillness that was only pierced by the rare wail of a syren far out to sea and the steady moan of the horn from the lighthouse.  He felt as dead as the world seemed, as grey, as lost to all rousing; and, ignorant of reactions, wondered why, and whether henceforth he would always be like that.