III.
When the evening of the dance arrived, Traill noticed that he was glad to get away. Term had now lasted for six weeks, and in another week it would be half-term. He was a little tired; he found it more difficult to get up in the morning. Little things mattered a great deal—he now emphatically disliked Perrin more than he had ever disliked anyone in his life before; there was even annoyance in the mere sight of his long, lean, untidy figure, in the sound of his assured, supercilious voice, in the sense of his arrogance.
They never spoke to each other if they could help it; meals were extremely disagreeable.
He found, too, that love did not mingle properly with school work. He was always going into day-dreams when he should have been teaching his form. He tried to keep the sea and the wood and the funny man that he had met there and Isabel apart from his work; but they came skipping in—and at night he dreamt—he was almost sure that she loved him.... Whenever they met now they were very silent.
He escaped whilst they were all in chapel. He lit his bicycle-lamp, wrapped a long, thin coat about him, and escaped. It had been a cold, fine day. The sun was just setting over the sea as he spun down the hard, white road.
As he flew between the dark, sweet-scented hedges, as he felt the wind in his ears and about his face, as the smell, salt and sharp, of the sea came to him, it was strange to find how the cares and troubles of those brown buildings on the hill fled away from him. He was already his old self; he sang to himself.
A faint red glow hovered over the dark, heaving water; the trees stood black on the horizon, and the long, low lines of shadow, white and gray, stole about the road as the evening sky slowly settled, with a little sighing of the wind, into the colors that it would bear during the night. The lights of the little village behind him made a red cluster against the dark shoulder of the Brown Hill.
He sang aloud.
It was a most enjoyable dance; he had never enjoyed a dance so much before. He realized that he, was looking on the past six weeks as imprisonment; he also noticed that when he told his partners that he was a schoolmaster they stared at him a little apprehensively. It was delightful to see Robin Trojan again. They walked into the garden and strolled about the paths together; he was much improved since the Cambridge days, Traill thought—less self-assured and with wider interests. And then Sir Henry Trojan always gave Traill a broader feeling of life—sanity and health and strength—and lie had an admirable sense of humor.
And then it was over, and Traill was speeding back over the hill again. He thought of Isabel all the way back. He fancied that she was with him in the dark. The night was so black that he could only see the little round white circle that his lamp flung on the road in front of him. The hedges, like black, bulging pillows, closed him in.