the college, all in
a clear light of infinite brightness and freshness. He could not
restrain his tears, and went back to his bed shaken with sobs, yet
aware that it was a luxurious sorrow; it was not sorrow for misspent
days; there were carelessnesses and failures innumerable, but no dark
shadows of regret; it was rather the thought that the good time was
over, that he had not realised, as it sped away, how infinitely sweet
it had been, and the thought that it was indeed over and done with, the
page closed, the flower faded, the song silent, pierced the very core
of his heart. One more last thrill of intense emotion was his; his
carriage, as he drove away, surmounted the bridge over the stream; the
old fields with the silent towers behind them lay beneath him, the home
of a hundred memories. There was hardly a yard of it all that he could
not connect with some little incident; the troubles, the unhappinesses,
such as they had been, were gone like a shadow; only the joy remained;
and the memory of those lost joys seemed like a bird beating its wings
in the clear air, as it flew to the shadow of the pines. What was to
follow? he cared little to think; all his mind was bent on the sweet
past. Something of the mystery of life came home to him in that
moment. He would have readily died then, he felt, if a wish could have
brought him death. Yet there was nothing morbid in the thought; it was
only that death seemed for a moment a fitting consummation for the end
of a period that had held a richness and joy that nothing else could
ever hold again.

IV

Undergraduate Days--Strain--Recovery--A First Book

The desire to be returning to school with which Hugh went up to the
university did not last long; he paid a visit to his housemaster, and
saw with a mixture of envy and amusement how his juniors had all
stepped quietly into the places which he and his friends had vacated,
and were enjoying the sensation of influence and activity. He was
courteously treated and even welcomed; but he felt all the time like
the _revenante_ of Christina Rossetti,--"I was of yesterday." And then
too, a few weeks after he had settled at Cambridge, in spite of the
strangeness of it all, in spite of the humiliation of being turned in a
moment from a person of dignity and importance into a mere "freshman,"
he realised that the freedom of the life, as compared with the
barrack-life of school, was irresistibly attractive. He had to k