The four months had been wonderful enough in their own way. During that period Paul felt he had crossed the invisible meridian separating childhood from adolescence. Just as the Clytemnestra had brought him into a region of bright new stars and a more potent sun, so she had mysteriously brought him into a new personal hemisphere; the sun of his individuality bore down upon him more directly, and his vague desires shone forth in constellations. The second movement in the composition of his life was well under way; the opening theme had been declaimed and sonorously amplified, and this lonely night watch was a sort of mental recitative, making a transition to the variation which would begin on the morrow, a variation which he could not quite foretell. That made the waiting breathlessly expectant.
He was now thirteen years of age, but the moral experience of several years had been crowded into the interval since his twelfth anniversary. He felt much older in mind and body than when he had signed the articles, yet he enjoyed a freedom and buoyancy of spirit he had never known in those years which grown-ups referred to as the happiest. Men spoke lightly of carefree childhood. He regarded childhood as a period of bitter perplexity, of groping fears, of haunted, tearstained nights, of tortuously developed principles and convictions, of brutal misunderstanding.
What price the far-off nights when he had cried himself sick at the fear that his mother had been buried alive! The endless days when he had striven vainly to overcome his enmity towards John Ashmill! The months of feud against Walter Dreer with whom he yearned to become reconciled! The weeks when he had struggled with monsters called into being by Walter's vile insinuations! Happiness, when every morning he had awakened to the sense of some ordeal! Happiness, when he had never entered the doors of a school-
