There had been little frost and no snow before Christmas. Gloomy, damp days had succeeded one another all through the month; and now, on the last Sunday of the old year, it seemed to Wolf, when he awoke in the darkness, that the air smelt of deep pools of rain. He awoke that morning long before his companion; and once awake he lay thinking intensely and excitedly for several hours. It was of his mother he thought. She had dropped a hint, while he was at Mrs. Herbert’s on the previous night, that she would like to start a teashop of her own, and that she thought of borrowing the money for this project from her present employer. Wolf was startled at the depth of the hurt to his pride that this information dealt him. In the early hours of that rain-smelling morning he made a drastic resolution. He would go back to Urquhart! What did it matter how he outraged his conscience over that accursed book, so long as his mother got this help from him