time—wasted it, he humbly admitted—hanging over the keyboard, when he was not practising but feverishly attempting to compose. How happy he had been at those times! He could not in his heart of hearts believe that they had been bad for him—even bad for his school work.
Resolutely he opened his Euclid at the problems and deductions he was to study for the next day. He placed the corner of the book exactly on the blot on the table. Then he dropped his pencil again. A bad beginning to drop one's pencil. . . . He looked down at it where it had fallen on a discarded sheet of paper on which was written a French exercise. He wondered at what word the tip of the pencil pointed. But he would not be so silly as to look. He would pick up the pencil and set to work. . . . Still, it would be interesting to know the word . . . perhaps he really ought to know the word . . . perhaps there was a meaning in this—something to help him.
He dropped to his knees and bent over the pencil, narrowing his eyes to decipher the blurred letters. The point of lead rested on the word âne. He felt shocked. "Ass!" That's what he was—a silly ass! Thank God, no one could see him! But stay—he had been mistaken in the word. It was not âne, but âme—"soul!" Ah, that was different. His soul—that was groping in the darkness. Strange that he should be kneeling there with the tip of the pencil pointing out the word "soul." It made him think of the times he had knelt by that chair, afraid of God, praying. He wanted suddenly to pray now, but words would not come. He remembered one night, more than two years ago, when Piers had made him get out of bed to say his prayers, just to rag him, and he had been able to remember only two words—Oh, God! Oh, God! What boundless, what terrible words! Words that unchained one's soul, whirled it upward, dissolved it. . . .
If once he gave way and began to pray, to let the words of prayer free his soul, there would be no study for him that night.
He would pick up his pencil and begin to work. . . .
But he found that he could not pick it up. Three times
