Quite apart from all that came of it, this visit to Guildford was something of a psychological experience at the time. The devotion of Harry Ringrose to his first school had been for years second only to his love for his old home, and now that the old home was his no longer, the old school was the place he loved best on earth. He knew it when he saw the well-remembered building once more in the golden light of that summer's evening. He knew it when he knelt in the school chapel and heard the most winning of human voices reading the school prayers. The chapel was new since Harry's day, but the prayers were not, and they reminded him of his own worst acts since he had heard them last. Mr. Innes sang tenor in the hymn, as he had always done, and Harry kept his ear on the voice he so loved; but the hymn itself was one of his old favourites, associated for ever with his first school, and it reminded him too. He looked about him, among the broad white collars, the innocent pink faces, and the open, singing mouths. He wondered which of the boys were leaving this term, and if one of them would leave with better resolutions than he had taken away with him seven years before ... and yet.... He had not been worse than others, but better perhaps than many; and yet there seemed no measure to his vileness, there certainly was none to his remorse, as he knelt again and prayed as he seemed never to have prayed since he was himself a little boy there at school. Then the organ pealed, and Mr. Innes went down the aisle with his grave fine face and his swinging stride. Mrs. Innes and Harry went next; the masters followed in their black gowns; and they all formed line in the passage outside, and the boys filed past and shook hands and said good-night on their way up to the dormitories.

Harry's visit extended over some days, and afterwards he used sometimes to wish that he had cut it short after the first delightful night. He was a creature of moods, and only a few minutes of each day were spent in chapel. It was a novel satisfaction to him to smoke his pipe with his old schoolmaster, to talk to him as man to man, and he knew too late that he had talked too much. He did not mean to be bombastic about his African adventures, but he was anxious that Mr. Innes should realise how much he had seen. Harry was in fact a little self-conscious with the man he had worn in his heart so many years, a little disappointed at being treated as an old boy rather than as a young man, and more eager to be entertaining than entertained. So when he came to the end of his own repertoire he related with enthusiasm some of the exploits of Gordon Lowndes. But the enthusiasm evaporated in the process, for Mr. Innes did not disguise his disapproval of the type of man described. And Harry himself saw Lowndes in a different light henceforth; for this is what it is to be so young and impressionable, and so keenly alive to the influence of others.

The best as well as the strongest influence Harry had ever known was that of Mr. Innes himself. He felt it as much now as ever he had done—and in old days it had been of Innes that he would think in his remorse for wrongdoing, and how it would hurt Innes that a boy of his should fall so far short of his teaching. It never occurred to him then that his hero was probably a man of the world after all, capable of human sympathy with human weakness, and even liable to human error on his own account. Nor did this strike him now—for Harry Ringrose was as yet too far from being a man of the world himself. The old idolatry was as strong in him as ever. And the old taint of personal emulation still took a little from its worth.

"If only I could be more like you!" he broke out when Mr. Innes had spoken a kind, strong word or two as Harry was going. "I used to try so hard—I will again!"

"What, to get like me?" said Innes with a laugh. "I hope you'll be a much better man than I am, Harry. But it's time you gave up trying to be like anybody."

"How do you mean?" asked Harry, his enthusiasm rather damped.

"Be yourself, old fellow."

"But myself is such a poor sort of thing!"

"Never mind. Try to make yourself strong; but don't think about yourself. Don't you see the distinction? Only think about doing your duty and helping others; the less you dwell upon yourself, the easier that will be. Good-bye, old fellow. Let me know how you get on."

"Good-bye, sir," said Harry. "You don't know how you help me! You are sending me away with a new thought altogether. I will do my best. I will indeed."

"I know you will," said Mr. Innes.

So ended the visit.

The new thought made its mark on Harry's character, but it was not all that he brought away with him from Guildford. The visit fired a train of sufficiently important material results, though the fuse burnt slowly, and for weeks did not seem to be burning at all. Harry came away with the match in his pocket, in the shape of a letter of introduction to a firm of scholastic agents.

Mr. Innes had by no means encouraged his old boy to try to become a schoolmaster; he feared that the two years in Africa would tell against Harry rather than in his favour, and then without a degree there was absolutely no future. He thought better of Harry's chances in literature. It was he who had encouraged the boy's very earliest literary leanings and attempts, and he took the kindest view of the accepted verses, of which he was shown a copy; but when he heard of the many failures which had followed that one exceeding small success, and of all the repulses which Harry had met with in the City, his old master was silent for some minutes, after which he sat down at his desk and wrote the introduction there and then.

"These fellows will get you something if anybody can," he had said; and, indeed, the gentlemen in question, on whom Harry called on his way back to Kensington, seemed confident of getting him something without delay. He had come to them in the very nick of time for next term's vacancies. They would send him immediately, and from day to day, particulars of posts for which he could apply; they had the filling of so many, there was little doubt but that he would obtain what he wanted before long. Their charge would be simply five per cent. on the first year's salary, which would probably be fifty pounds, or sixty if they were lucky.

Harry went home jubilant. The agents had taken down his name and his father's name without question or comment. They declined to regard the years in Africa as a serious disqualification, much less since he had been a tutor there; and Harry began to think that Mr. Innes had taken an unnecessarily black view of his chances. He knew better in a few weeks' time.

It is true that at first he had a thick letter every day, containing the promised particulars of several posts. How used he grew to the clerk's mauve round hand, to the thin sheets of paper damp from the gelatine that laid each opening before Heaven knew how many applicants—to the unvarying formula employed! The Reverend So-and-So, of Dashton, Blankshire, would require in September the services of a junior master, possessing qualifications thereupon stated with the salary offered. The vacant posts were in all parts of the country, and the sanguine Harry pictured himself in almost every county in England while awaiting his fate in one quarter after another. In few cases were the qualifications more than he actually possessed, for he was at least capable of taking the lowest form in a preparatory school, while he could truthfully describe himself as being "fond of games." But the agents' clients would have none of him, and as time went on the agents' envelopes grew thin with single enclosures, and came to hand only once in a way.

And yet several head-masters wrote kindly answers to Harry's application, and two or three seemed on the verge of engaging him. Some interviewed him at the agents' offices, and one had him down to luncheon at his school, paying Harry's fare all the way into Hertfordshire and back. Another only rejected him because Harry was not a fast round-hand bowler, and a fast round-hand bowler was essential—not for the school matches, in which the masters took no part, but for the town, for which they played regularly every Saturday: the music-master bowled slow left, and fast right was indispensable at the other end. But the failures that were all but successes were only the harder to bear, and the bitter fact remained that the lad was no more wanted in the schoolroom than in the office. It struck him sometimes as a grim commentary on the education he had himself received. A thousand or two had been spent upon it, and he had not left school a dunce. He knew as much, perhaps, as the average boy on going up to the university from a public school, and of what use was it to him? It did not enable him to earn his bread. He felt some bitterness against the system which had taught him to swim only with the life-belt of influence and money. It had been his fate to be pitched overboard without one.

Not that he was idle all this time. In the dreadful dog-days, when none but the poor were left in London, and the heat in the little flat became well-nigh insupportable, so that poor Mrs. Ringrose was quite prostrate from its effects, her son sat in his shirt and trousers and plied his pen again in sheer desperation. He wrote out the true incident which he had been advised would make a capital magazine article if written down just as he told it. So he tried to do so; and sent the result to Uncle Tom. It came back almost by return of post, with a civil note from the Editor, saying that he could not use the story as the end was so unsatisfactory. It was unsatisfactory because the story happened to be true, and the author never thought of meddling with the facts, though he weighted his work with several immaterial points which he had forgotten when telling the tale verbally. He now flew to the opposite extreme, and dashed off a brief romance unadulterated by a solitary fact or a single instance of original observation. This was begun with ambitious ideas of a match with some shilling monthly, but it was only offered to the penny weeklies, and was burnt unprinted some few months later.

One day, however, the day on which Harry went down to Hertfordshire at a pedagogue's expense, and was coming back heavy with the knowledge that he would not do, the spirit moved him to invest a penny in a comic paper with a considerable vogue. He needed something to cheer him up, and for all he knew this sheet might be good or bad enough to make him smile; it was neither, but it proved to be the best investment he had ever made. It contained a conspicuous notice to contributors, and a number of sets of intentionally droll verses on topics of the week. Before Harry got out at King's Cross he had the rough draft of such a production on his shirtcuff; he wrote it out and sent it off that night; and it appeared in the very next issue of that comic pennyworth.

And this time Harry felt that he had done something that he could do again; but days passed without a word from the Editor, and it looked very much as though the one thing he could do would prove to be unpaid work. At length he determined to find out. The paper's strange name was Tommy Tiddler ("St. Thomas must be your patron saint," said Mrs. Ringrose), and its funereal offices were in a court off the Strand. Harry blundered into the counting-house and asked to see the Editor, at which an elderly gentleman turned round on a high stool and viewed him with suspicion. What did he want with the Editor?

"I had a contribution in the last issue," said Harry, nervously, "and—and I wanted to know if there would be any payment."

"But that has nothing to do with the Editor," said the old gentleman. "That is my business."

He got down from his stool and produced a file of the paper, in which the price of every contribution was marked across it, with the writer's name in red ink. Harry was asked to point out his verses, and with a thrill he saw that they were priced at half-a-sovereign. In another minute the coin was in his purse and he was signing the receipt with a hand that shook.

"Monday is our day for paying contributors," the old gentleman said. "In future you must make it convenient to call or apply in writing on that day."

In future!

On his way out he had to pass through the publishing department, where stacks of the new issue were being carried in warm from the machines. It was not on sale until the following day, but Harry could not resist asking to look at a copy, for he had sent in a second set of verses on the appearance of the first. And there they were! He found them instantly and could have cried for joy.

The Inner Circle was never a slower or more stifling route than on that August afternoon; neither was Harry Ringrose ever happier in his life than when he alighted before the train stopped at High Street, Kensington. He had done it two weeks running. He knew that he could go on doing it. He was earning twenty-six pounds a year, and earning it in an hour a week! He almost ran along the hot street, and he took the stairs three at a time. As he fumbled with his latch-key in his excitement, he heard talking within and had momentary misgivings; but his lucky day had dawned at last: the visitor was Fanny Lowndes.