What were his sensations to him now? What was the air of a morning like this, without those mysterious emanations from the glimmering depths?

He had comforted Gerda; and the way she was happy now in her childish delight over that two hundred ought to have given a fresh glow to his days. But it didn’t. That startling alliance between Christie and Olwen, which he had plotted in the face of so many difficulties, and which was apparently absorbing both of them in its excitement, ought to have satisfied him. But it only made his thoughts gloomier. The last time he had seen Christie, her mind was so full of Olwen and Olwen’s future, that she scarcely listened to what he was telling her!

Through the dizzy foreground of these boys’ heads, white collars, sharp elbows, and scratching pens, through the patient “notes” he himself was dictating to them, floated in long procession all the people of his life.