"I don't know," he said, beginning to flush with the consciousness of his great daring, "if you would care to let me help you at all. I should be delighted to do so, you know, at any time. Since—" he laughed a little—"since you're no longer a scrap nervous of me, you might find me useful in giving you a few odd hints."
He waited, anxious and perturbed, for her reply. After a sufficient pause she answered slowly, as if thinking it out: "That would be—rather—fine—I think."
Most inopportunely then the bell began to ring for afternoon-school, and, most inopportunely also, he was due to take five beta in drawing. They clambered down the ladder, chatting vivaciously the while, and at the vestry door, when they separated she said eagerly: "Oh, I've had such a good time, Mr. Speed. Haven't you?"
"Rather!" he answered, with boyish emphasis and enthusiasm.
That afternoon hour, spent bewilderingly with five beta in the art-room that was full of plaster casts and free-hand models and framed reproductions of famous pictures, went for Speed like the passage of a moment. His heart and brain were tingling with excitement, teeming with suppressed consciousness. The green of the lawns as he looked out of the window seemed greener than ever before; the particles of dust that shone in the shafts of sunlight seemed to him each one mightily distinct; the glint of a boy's golden hair in the sunshine was, to his eyes, like a patch of flame that momentarily put all else in a haze. It seemed to him, passionately and tremendously, that for the first time in his life he was alive; more than that even: it seemed to him that for the first time since the beginning of all things life had come shatteringly into the world.
III
"I should think, Mr. Speed, you have found out by now whether Helen likes you or not."
Those words of Clare Harrington echoed in his ears as he walked amidst the dappled sunlight on the Millstead road. They echoed first of all in the quiet tones in which Clare had uttered them; next, they took on a subtle, meaningful note of their own; finally, they submerged all else in a crescendo of passionate triumph. Speed was almost stupefied by their gradually self-revealing significance. He strode on faster, dug his heels more decisively into the dust of the roadside; he laughed aloud; his walking-stick pirouetted in a joyful circle. To any passer-by he must have seemed a little mad. And all because of a few words that Clare Harrington, riding along the lane on her bicycle, had stopped to say to him.
June, lovely and serene, had spread itself out over Millstead like a veil of purest magic; every day the sun climbed high and shone fiercely; every night the world slept under the starshine; all the passage of nights and days was one moving pageant of wonderment. And Speed was happy, gloriously, overwhelmingly happy. Never in all his life before had he been so happy; never had he tasted, even to an infinitesimal extent, the kind of happiness that bathed and drenched him now. Rapturously lovely were those long June days, days that turned Millstead into a flaming paradise of sights and sounds. In the mornings, he rose early, took a cold plunge in the swimming-bath, and breakfasted with the school amidst the cool morning freshness that, by its very quality of chill, seemed to suggest bewitchingly the warmth that was to come. Chapel followed breakfast, and after that, until noon, his time was spent in the Art and Music Rooms and the various form-rooms in which he contrived to satisfy parental avidity for that species of geography known as commercial. From noon until midday dinner he either marked books in his room or went shopping into the town. During that happy hour the cricket was beginning, and the dining-hall at one o'clock was gay with cream flannels and variously chromatic blazers. Speed loved the midday meal with the school; he liked to chat with his neighbours at table, to listen to the catalogue of triumphs, anxieties, and anticipations that never failed to unfold itself to the sympathetic hearer. Afterwards he was free to spend the afternoon as he liked. He might cycle dreamily along the sleepy lanes and find himself at tea-time in some wrinkled little sun-scorched inn, with nothing to do but dream his own glorious dreams and play with the innkeeper's languid dog and read local newspapers a fortnight old. Or he might stay the whole afternoon at Millstead, lazily watching the cricket from a deck-chair on the pavilion verandah and sipping the tuck-shop's iced lemonade. Less often he would play cricket himself, never scoring more than ten or a dozen runs, but fielding with a dogged energy which occasionally only just missed deserving the epithet brilliant. And sometimes, in the excess of his enthusiasm, he would take selected parties of the boys to Pangbourne Cathedral, some eighteen miles distant, and show them the immense nave and the Lady Chapel with the decapitated statues and the marvellous stained-glass of the Octagon.
Then dinner, conversational and sometimes boisterous, in the Masters' Common-Room, and afterwards, unless it were his evening for taking preparation, an hour at least of silence before the corridors and dormitories became noisy. During this hour he would often sit by the open window in his room and hear the rooks cawing in the high trees and the clankety-clank of the roller on the cricket-pitch and all the mingled sounds and commotions that seemed to him to make the silence of the summer evenings more magical than ever. Often, too, he would hear the sound of the Head's piano, a faint half-pathetic tinkle from below.