Weary as he was he seldom went to bed before midnight, sometimes long after, for he clung to those few hours of freedom with something like savage obstinacy; during this small portion of each day at least, he would possess his own soul, be free to think and read.  Then came the penalty of anguish unutterable when the morning had to be faced.  These dark, foggy February mornings crushed him with a recurring misery which often drove him to the verge of mania.  His head throbbing with the torture of insufficient sleep, he lay in dull half-conscious misery till there was no longer time to prepare breakfast, and he had to hasten off to school after a mouthful of dry bread which choked him.  There had been moments when his strength failed, and he found his eyes filling with tears of wretchedness.  To face the hideous drudgery of the day’s teaching often cost him more than it had cost many men to face the scaffold.  The hours between nine and one, the hours between half-past two and five, Waymark cursed them minute by minute, as their awful length was measured by the crawling hands of the school-clock.  He tried sometimes, in mere self-defence, to force himself into an interest in his work, that the time might go the quicker; but the effort was miserably vain.  His senses reeled amid the din and rattle of classes where discipline was unknown and intelligence almost indiscoverable.  Not seldom his temper got the better even of sick lassitude; his face at such times paled with passion, and in ungoverned fury he raved at his tormentors.  He awed them, too, but only for the moment, and the waste of misery swallowed him up once more.

Was this to be his life?—­he asked himself.  Would this last for ever?

For some reason, the morning after the visit to the masters’ room just spoken of found him in rather better spirits than usual.  Perhaps it was that he had slept fairly well; a gleam of unwonted sunshine had doubtless something to do with it.  Yet there was another reason, though he would scarcely admit it to himself.  It was the day on which he gave a drawing-lesson to Dr. Tootle’s two eldest children.  These drawing-lessons were always given in a room upstairs, which was also appropriated to the governess who came every morning to teach three other young Tootles, two girls and a boy, the latter considered not yet old enough to go into the school.  On the previous day, Waymark had been engaged in the room for half an hour touching up some drawings of boys in the school, which were about to be sent home.  He knew that he should find a fresh governess busy with the children, the lady hitherto employed having gone at a moment’s notice after a violent quarrel with Mrs. Tootle, an incident which had happened not infrequently before.  When he entered the room, he saw a young woman seated with her back to him, penning a copy, whilst the children jumped and rioted about her in their usual fashion.  The late governess had been a mature person of features rather serviceable