vast importance. The boy had now reached an age and a period where emotions, judgments, partialities, conclusions and surmises were fighting furiously for dominion. His seven years at Brockett's had been, introspectively, of little moment. He had been too busy discovering the things that other people had discovered and written down to think very much about himself.
Now released from the domination of books, he plunged into a whirlpool of surmise about himself. During the fortnight that he sat writing his articles in Bucket Lane he flew, he sank, according to his moods. It seemed to him that as soon as he had decided on one path and set out eagerly to follow it others crossed it and bewildered him.
He was now on that unwholesome, absorbing, thrilling, dangerous path of self-discovery. Opposed to this was the inarticulate, friendly soul of Stephen. Stephen understood nothing and at the same time understood everything. Against the testing of his few simple laws Peter's complexities often vanished . . . but vanished only to recur again unsatisfied, demanding a subtler answer. It was during those days, through all the trouble and even horror that so shortly came upon them both, that Stephen realised with a dull, unreasoned pain, like lead at the heart, that Peter was passing inevitably from him into a country whither Stephen could not follow—to deal with issues that Stephen could not, in any kind of way, understand. Stephen realised this many days before Peter even dimly perceived it, and the older man by the love that he had for the boy whom he had known from the very first period of his growth was enabled, although dimly, to see beyond, above all these complexities, to a day when Peter would once more, having learnt and suffered much in the meanwhile, come back to that first simplicity.
But that day was far distant.
II
On the evening of the day on which Peter finished the last of his five attempts to take the London journals by storm Stephen returned from his restaurant earlier than usual—so early indeed, that Peter, had he not been so bent on his own immediate affairs, must have noticed and ques-
