Well, he could always go back to Stotwell; and besides, as he suddenly remembered, not ten miles away his old school stood among its village. A contract! Now was the school’s chance to live up to some of the pious platitudes about esprit de corps. He remembered how powerful and how genuine had been the emo­tions that ran through him on his last morning at school, when he had stood with the other furry-faced gawks in the Sixth Form, droning out for the last time the termly intercession for ‘those who here shall meet no more’:

May their seed-time past be yielding

Year by year a richer store.

The store referred to was, of course, an inexpensive one of associations and loyalties, taken out of the drawer with the House tie for the annual Old Boys’ shower-bath of nostalgia and falsity; but here at least was the school’s chance to provide one granary with something substantial. A contract! The holy word echoed through his mind as he clambered out of the ’bus in the market square and walked up the hill to the school.

Complete and joyous as his rejection of the past had been, he still could not walk into this ivy-clad red building—a fake Rugby like so many minor schools of its period—with the sang-froid of one who had never been there before. Although the eight years he had spent here were part of a former life, that former life had the power, at least, to cause him discomfort enough to pierce his new-found calm. To be recognized by the janitor; to be conducted, in the afternoon drowsiness, down the corridor past that row of dingy form-rooms where the pitiful farce of his childhood had been played out act after endless act, and where the dragons, gods, and wizards who had peopled that fantastic region sat now, even this minute, building their endless crumbling structure in the minds of a fresh generation. It was uncomfortable; but the dis­comfort dropped away when he was left alone in the headmaster’s waiting-room, for with solitude returned the consciousness that he had cut away the tentacles that bound him to the kind of life that this place represented. So soon after his seed-time, he was here to ask for a limited and definite harvest. A contract!

At last he was ushered in to the headmaster’s study: that room which, with its careful arrangement of the ‘traditional’ props of leather armchairs, classical busts, glass-fronted book-cases, had been the scene of the utmost disasters and triumphs of his boy­hood, though he had been too average a boy to enter it more than four or five times during his eight years. And there was the familiar sardonic face wryly hovering behind its thick lenses.

‘Well now, Lumley; and what can I,’ here he paused for an instant, and spoke the next three words with unnecessary distinct­ness, as if to parody them, ‘do for you?’