town, he remained in his room, like one of those immigrants who come into the port of their hopes in high spirits, and, having looked over the rail at the strangeness of the land, retire below decks and sit on their trunks, reluctant to go ashore. All the past, which he had put behind him irrevocably, came to him, now, in a more vivid presence than the present itself. The strange room in which he sat "dazing" over his book—as Miss Morris would have said—was lost in the shadows that hung around his lamp; and he was sitting in the room in which he had used to lock himself from Miss Morris's persecutions, the room which he had shared with his imaginary playmate, the room in which he had read his "Faerie Queene," in which he had written his first love-letter, in which he had defied his father, in which he had planned his future and thought to leave his past. Celt that he was, he sat there turning over his recollections like the pages of an old book, slowly idealizing even his most unhappy experiences and seeing all beautiful through the mists of regretful memory.
And that mood was to be the dominant one of his first weeks at college. Conroy was separated from him by the divergence of their studies, and Donald avoided his new classmates as shyly as he had his old. They—the prize students of small towns, the ambitious sons of poor farmers—had come, by the hundreds, to study for the "professions" at the expense of the government, with no pocket-money beyond what paid their board, working for free scholarships with the same untiring labour that had
