The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation¹, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext² that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse³. He had got out of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly⁴ speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated⁵ and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian⁶ the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that’s so unnatural⁷ for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan.