instinctive feeling towards his mother's family; but it was strong enough to make him more than ever the pariah at heart when he came down from dormitory on the last morning, in his unaccustomed bowler (but not the "loud tie" of all the bigger fellows), and partook of the meat breakfast provided in the gaslit hall; and so out into the chilling twilight, to squeeze into some omnibus because he had failed to take Chips's advice and order a trap in the middle of the term.
Jan's journey was all across country, and long before the end he had shaken off the last of his schoolfellows travelling in the same direction. It happened that he knew very few of that contingent even by name, and yet he was sorry when they had all been left behind; they were the last links with a place where he now realised that he felt more at home than he was ever likely to feel in the holidays. Eventually he reached a bleak rural station, where there was nothing to meet him, and walked up to the rectory, leaving casual instructions about his luggage.
It was not a pleasant walk; there had evidently been more snow in Norfolk than at school, and it had started to thaw while Jan was in the train. The snow stuck to his boots, and the cold was far more penetrating than it had seemed during the frost. The rectory, however, was the nearest point of the thatched and straggling hamlet of which it was also the manor house. It stood in its own park, a mile and more from the vast flint church in which a handful of people were lost at its two perfunctory services a week. The rector was in fact more squire than parson, though he wore a white tie as often as not, and conducted a forbidding form of family prayer every week-day of his life. He chanced to be the first person whom Jan saw in the grounds, on the sweep of the drive
