her heart smote her. She let it go, and that she might not see him say
good-night to the girl, turned and mounted to her room.

Fully dressed, she flung herself on the bed, and there lay, her
handkerchief across her mouth, gnawing at its edges.


XV


Mark's nineteenth birthday rose in grey mist, slowly dropped its veil
to the grass, and shone clear and glistening. He woke early. From his
window he could see nothing in the steep park but the soft blue-grey,
balloon-shaped oaks suspended one above the other among the round-topped
boulders. It was in early morning that he always got his strongest
feeling of wanting to model things; then and after dark, when, for want
of light, it was no use. This morning he had the craving badly, and
the sense of not knowing how weighed down his spirit. His drawings,
his models--they were all so bad, so fumbly. If only this had been his
twenty-first birthday, and he had his money, and could do what he liked.
He would not stay in England. He would be off to Athens, or Rome, or
even to Paris, and work till he COULD do something. And in his holidays
he would study animals and birds in wild countries where there were
plenty of them, and you could watch them in their haunts. It was stupid
having to stay in a place like Oxford; but at the thought of what Oxford
meant, his roaming fancy, like a bird hypnotized by a hawk, fluttered,
stayed suspended, and dived back to earth. And that feeling of wanting
to make things suddenly left him. It was as though he had woken up,
his real self; then--lost that self again. Very quietly he made his way
downstairs. The garden door was not shuttered, not even locked--it must