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sunlight on the Mill-stead road. They echoed first of all in the
quiet tones in which Clare had uttered them; next, they took on a subtle,
meaningful note of their own; finally, they submerged all else in a crescendo
of passionate triumph. Speed was almost stupefied by their gradually
self-revealing significance. He strode on faster, dug his heels more
decisively into the dust of the roadside; he laughed aloud; his walking-stick
pirouetted in a joyful circle. To any passer-by he must have seemed a little
mad. And all because of a few words that Clare Harrington, riding along the
lane on her bicycle, had stopped to say to him.
    June, lovely and serene, had spread itself out over Millstead like a veil
of purest magic; every day the sun climbed high and shone fiercely; every
night the world slept under the starshine; all the passage of nights and days
was one moving pageant of wonderment. And Speed was happy, gloriously,
overwhelmingly happy. Never in all his life before had he been so happy;
never had he tasted, even to an infinitesimal extent, the kind of happiness
that bathed and drenched him now. Rapturously lovely were those long June
days, days that turned Millstead into a flaming paradise of sights and
sounds. In the mornings, he rose early, took a cold plunge in the
swimming-bath, and breakfasted with the school amidst the cool morning
freshness that, by its very quality of chill, seemed to suggest bewitchingly
the warmth that was to come. Chapel followed breakfast, and after that, until
noon, his time was spent in the Art and Music Rooms and the various
form-rooms in which he contrived to satisfy parental avidity for that species
of geography known as commercial. From noon until midday dinner he either
marked books in his room or went shopping into the town. During that happy
hour the cricket was beginning, and the dining-hall at one o’clock was gay
with cream flannels and variously chromatic blazers. Speed loved the midday
meal with the school; he liked to chat with his neighbours at table, to
listen to the catalogue of triumphs, anxieties, and anticipations that never
failed to unfold itself to the sympathetic hearer. Afterwards he was free to
spend the afternoon as he liked. He might cycle dreamily along the sleepy
lanes and find himself at teatime in some wrinkled little sun-scorched inn,
with nothing to do but dream his own glorious dreams and play with the
innkeeper’s languid dog and read local newspapers a fortnight old. Or he
might stay the whole afternoon at Millstead, lazily watching the cricket from
a deck-chair on the pavilion verandah and sipping the tuck-shop’s iced
lemonade. Less often he would play cricket himself, never scoring more than
ten or a dozen runs, but fielding with a dogged energy which occasionally
only just missed deserving the epithet brilliant. And sometimes, in the
excess of his enthusiasm, he would take selected parties of the boys to
Pangbourne Cathedral, some eighteen miles distant, and show them the immense
nave and the Lady Chapel with the decapitated statues and the marvellous
stained-glass of the Octagon.
    Then dinner, conversational and sometimes boisterous, in the Masters’
Common-Room, and afterwards, unless it were his evening for taking
preparation, an hour at least of silence before the corridors and dormitories
became noisy. During this hour he would often sit by the open window in his
room and hear the rooks cawing in the high trees and the clankety-clank of the roller on the cricket-pitch and all the mingled
sounds and commotions that seemed to him to make the silence of the summer
evenings more magical than ever. Often, too, he would hear the sound of the
Head’s piano, a faint half-pathetic tinkle from below.
    Half-past eight let loose the glorious pandemonium; he could hear from his
room the chiming of the school-bell, and then, softly at first, but soon
rising to a tempestuous flood, the tide of invasion