For
ten years he had had the same bedroom, an old low-ceilinged room with
queer bulges in the wall, a crooked fireplace and a slanting floor. For
years now he had had a wall-paper with an ever-recurrent scene of a church
tower, a snowy hill, and a large crimson robin. The robins were faded, and
the snowy hill a dingy yellow. There were School groups and Oxford groups
on the walls, and the book-case near the door had his old school prizes
and Henty and a set of the Waverley Novels with dark red covers and paper
labels.
Hardest of all to leave was the view from the window overlooking the
Cathedral Green and the Cathedral. That window had been connected with
every incident of his childhood. He had leant out of it when he had felt
sick from eating too much, he had gone to it when his eyes were brimming
with hot rebellious tears after some scene with his father, he had known
ecstatic joys gazing from it on the first day of his return from school,
he had thrown things out of it on the heads of unsuspecting strangers, he
had gone to it in strange moods of poetry and romance, and watched the
moon like a plate of dull and beaten gold sail above the Cathedral towers,
he had sat behind it listening to the organ like a muffled giant
whispering to be liberated from grey, confining walls, he had looked out
of it on a still golden evening when the stars were silver buttons in the
sky after a meeting with Annie; he went to it and gazed, heart-sick,
across the Green now when he was about to bid fare-well to it for ever.
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