e hour
at which they must return, and Ishmael and Killigrew nearly always took
their rods and spent the half-holidays at Bolowen Pool, rarely catching
anything, for the trout were abnormally shy; but Ishmael at least had
the true fisherman's temperament, and was content to sit all day at one
end of a rod and line even without a fish at the other. As for
Killigrew, he was soon following where Ishmael led, and would have gone
bug-hunting with him had he so decreed, though he felt relieved that
Ishmael had cast such things aside.

Ishmael was casting aside much these days. He was at that expanding age
which accepts what it is taught as good, but thinks it fine to throw it
over. Later comes the age of thinking for oneself and concluding that
whatever one has been taught is bad. Curiously enough the outward result
of the two states is the same. Only later comes the period of judicious
sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly
formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's
root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the
school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his
inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his
bent for dominance made some action, one way or the other, necessary.
The Parson sank more and more into the background, but there came over
the rim of his world a new figure that, oddly enough, filled much the
same place.

On that first night at school, when the Parson had gone back home and
Ishmael lay in a narrow little bed, one of ten such, in the darkened
dormitory, he shed no tears for the Parson, or for his old companions,
nor yet for the strangeness of the new world where he might, in the
reaction from the first excitement, have been feeling lonely. He was too
solidly set on getting all that was possible out of his fresh life. But
in his most curious searchings into the likely future as he lay that
night for an hour or so upon a wakeful pillow, he did not picture
anything as delightful as, in after years, he was to realise Hilaria
Eliot had been for those boys who at the time so casually and
unthinkingly enjoyed her wayward companionship.

CHAPTER X

HILARIA

"Point the toe, if you please young gentlemen; slide well forward and
bow to your partner from the waist.... Ruan, you have the air of a poker
trying to be graceful. Watch Killigrew and do as he does. Now, all
together pleas