As he knelt that night in the dim Chapel and offered up a grateful thanksgiving that life and health had been spared to him, he resolved more definitely and consciously than ever before that whatever he did in the world thereafter he would never live wholly or selfishly for himself.
And in after years he was to look back on that night, as he looked back on the night on the beach when he had walked with Mr. Morris, as another important moment in the process of his coming to himself.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE LAST TERM
It was a warm bright May day, with just enough breeze to fleck the waves of the bay and passage with white caps and make it lively for the school crews in their heavy whaleboats, the substitute at Deal for the conventional shell.
From their post on the Rocking-stone or just by it, high up on the highest ridge of Lovel’s Woods, two boys looked out upon the spreading panorama of marsh and beach and river and bay. They both were drinking it in with a deep sense of its beauty and with a sense too that it was the more beautiful in that it all was a part of the old school. Up on the hill there, across the wide valley of the marshes and Beaver Pond and Creek, rose the school itself, gleaming now in the bright western sunlight as a fairy castle of rose and gold.
One of the boys by the Rocking-stone was Tony Deering, coatless, hatless, his hair glowing in the sunlight, half-hidden by the tall sweet grass in which he lay at full length. The other was Reginald Carroll, now nearly at the end of his Freshman year at Kingsbridge College, back at the School for a week-end as he had so often been since his graduation the previous June. Much of his time on these occasions, though we have not chanced to note it, was spent with Deering, much too with Mr. Morris between whom and himself the old feeling of distrust had altogether dropped away. For during his last term at school Reggie had won his house-master’s confidence as well as his regard.