"I'm—I'm—I'm glad."
They stood together for a long while with the moonlight on their faces, watching and thinking and dreaming and wondering. The ten o'clock chimes littered the air with their mingled pathos and cheer; the hour had been like the dissolving moment of a dream.
As they entered the shadows of the high trees and came in sight of Milner's, a tall cliff of winking yellow windows, they stopped and kissed again, a shade more passionately than before.
"But oh," she exclaimed as they separated in the shadow of the Head's gateway, "I wish I was clever! I wish I was as clever as you! I'm not, Kenneth, and you mustn't think I am. I'm—I'm stupid, compared with you. And yet"—her voice kindled with a strange thrill—"and yet you say I'm wonderful! Wonderful!—Am I?—Really wonderful?"
"Wonderful," he whispered, fervently.
She cried, softly but with passion: "Oh, I'm glad—glad—I'm glad. It's—it's glorious to—to think that you think that. But oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, don't find out that I'm not." She added, very softly and almost as if reassuring herself of something: "I—I love you very—very much."
They could not tear themselves away from each other. The lights in the dormitories winked out one by one; the quarter-chimes sprinkled their music on the moon-white lawns; yet still, fearful to separate, they whispered amidst the shadows. Millstead, towering on all sides of them vast and radiant, bathed them in her own deep passionless tranquillity; Millstead, a little forlorn that night, yet ever a mighty parent, serenely watchful over her children.
VI
He decided that night that he would write a story about Millstead; that he would do for Millstead what other people had already done for Eton and Harrow and Rugby. He would put down all the magic that he had seen and felt; he would transfer to paper the subtle enchantment of the golden summer days, the moonlit nights, the steamy warmth of the bathrooms, the shouting in the dormitories, the buzz of movement and conversation in the dining hall, the cool gloom of the chapel—everything that came effortlessly into his mind whenever he thought of Millstead. All the beauty and emotion and rapture that he had seen and felt must not, he determined, be locked inside him: it clamoured to be set free, to flow strongly yet purposefully in the channel of some mighty undertaking.
Clanwell asked him in to coffee that night: from half-past ten till half-past eleven Speed lounged in one of Clanwell's easy chairs and found a great difficulty in paying attention to what Clanwell was saying. In the end his thoughts burst, as it were, their barriers: he said: "D'you know, Clanwell, I've had an idea—some time, you know—to write a tale about Millstead?"