“Not celebrating, Reginald?” he enquired.
“No, Mr. Morris,” answered Carroll, rising.
A momentary wave of anger swept over Morris’s strong kindly face. “Is it that your school spirit is so slack or that your French novel is so absorbing?”
Carroll bowed with an icy politeness. “I am afraid, Mr. Morris,” he said at last, with compressed lips, “that whichever explanation I gave would mean the same to you.”
“I am afraid it would, Reginald,” said Mr. Morris, as he turned away, with something like a sigh. “Good-night.”
“Good-night, sir.”
Carroll sat for a long time without reading, listening to the shouts upon the campus. At length he picked up his novel, went into his bedroom, and undressed. Before getting into bed, he darkened his transom, lighted a small electric night-lamp, and laid a pad and pencil on the table by his bedside. For an hour or more, long after the excitement had ebbed without and the boys had got back and gone noisily to bed, long after he had heard the watchman make his stealthy midnight rounds, Carroll sat there in bed, gazing dreamily out of his window upon the moonlit sea and the misty outlines of Lovel’s Woods and at the ruby intermittent glow of Deigr Light, and now and then he jotted down a line or word upon the pad. This was what he wrote:
The pure stars shine above the flowing sea,
The strand is gleaming in the moon’s soft light,
The south wind blows across the murky lea,
The lamps of Monday glimmer in the night.
The moon sags slowly in the violet west,
A yellow crescent, cloud-hung all about,