of the street lamps was mysterious.  Perhaps he repeated these admirable letters to various friends.  He did not know what a troubling effect they had upon Philip; they seemed to make his life very humdrum.  With the spring Hayward grew dithyrambic.  He proposed that Philip should come down to Italy.  He was wasting his time at Heidelberg.  The Germans were gross and life there was common; how could the soul come to her own in that prim landscape?  In Tuscany the spring was scattering flowers through the land, and Philip was nineteen; let him come and they could wander through the mountain towns of Umbria.  Their names sang in Philip’s heart.  And Cacilie too, with her lover, had gone to Italy.  When he thought of them Philip was seized with a restlessness he could not account for.  He cursed his fate because he had no money to travel, and he knew his uncle would not send him more than the fifteen pounds a month which had been agreed upon.  He had not managed his allowance very well.  His pension and the price of his lessons left him very little over, and he had found going about with Hayward expensive.  Hayward had often suggested excursions, a visit to the play, or a bottle of wine, when Philip had come to the end of his month’s money; and with the folly of his age he had been unwilling to confess he could not afford an extravagance.

Luckily Hayward’s letters came seldom, and in the intervals Philip settled down again to his industrious life.  He had matriculated at the university and attended one or two courses of lectures.  Kuno Fischer was then at the height of his fame and during the winter had been lecturing brilliantly on Schopenhauer.  It was Philip’s introduction to philosophy.  He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting.  The pessimism of the subject attracted his youth; and he believed that the world he was about to enter was a place of pitiless woe and of darkness.  That made him none the less eager to enter it; and when, in due course, Mrs. Carey, acting as the correspondent for his guardian’s views, suggested that it was time for him to come back to England, he agreed with enthusiasm.  He must make up his mind now what he meant to do.  If he left Heidelberg at the end of July they could talk things over during August, and it would be a good time to make arrangements.

The date of his departure was settled, and Mrs. Carey wrote to him again.  She reminded him of Miss Wilkinson, through whose kindness he had gone to Frau Erlin’s house at Heidelberg, and told him that she had arranged to spend a few weeks with them at Blackstable.  She would be crossing from Flushing on such and such a day, and if he travelled at the same time he could look after her and come on to Blackstable in her company.  Philip’s shyness immediately made him write to say that he could not leave till a day or two afterwards.  He pictured himself looking out for Miss Wilkinson, the embarrassment of going up to her and asking if it were she (and he might so easily address the wrong person and be snubbed), and then the difficulty of knowing whether in the train he ought to talk to her or whether he could ignore her and read his book.