changing all around him. New forces were drawing him this way and that. At times he felt an aching in his breast that was almost a pain, a yearning for what he knew not. Not for religion. Not for love—he had not attempted to make love to Ada again—but for something of which religion and love were only a part. His eyes were troubled, he grew thinner. Yet he was always hungry. On the days when there was no practice of the orchestra, he would go, after the school luncheon, to a large shop much frequented by the boys when they were in funds. There he would wander up and down past the glittering glass cases of tempting foods displayed; platters of ham and tongue; fiery red lobsters, and little pink shrimps; he would droop over the case of cheeses, fascinated. The cream cheese, Swiss cheese, Camembert, Roquefort, Oka, the dear little cheeses made by the Trappist monks in Quebec. He thought he should like to be a monk working in the cool rooms of the monastery, and he would buy this particular cheese, though he did not much like it, because of the thought it brought. And at the other side of the shop would be George, giving his money for cakes and chocolates, and bottled fruit from California.
They would go off with their spoil, and at recess they and their friends would devour it in haste, or a feast would be arranged after school, when they could eat at leisure. They contrived, however, to put by a respectable sum for the radio, and toward a camping trip in the summer. Finch would have liked to buy presents for the family from the wealth that poured in so fast, but where would they think he had got the money? But he could not resist a necktie for Renny's birthday, which fell in March. He spent a long time in the haberdasher's choosing it—two shades of blue in a gorgeous stripe. Renny's eyebrows flew up in surprise when it was presented. He was touched. But when he appeared at Sunday tea wearing it, the vivid blue blazing against the highly coloured flesh of his face, his red hair, a storm of protest arose from the family. Renny's beauty—which, they declared, required dark colours to set it off—was ruined by the tie. Now it would have become Piers, with his blue eyes and
