The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent back to Clongowes.  The practice in the park came to an end when Mike Flynn went into hospital.  Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the evening.  The gang fell asunder and there were no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks.  Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat.  Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door.  He thought it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from.  But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer’s flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future.  In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes.  For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world.  The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.  A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare’s hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood.  Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue.  The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.  The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others.  He did not want to play.  He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.  He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.  They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place.  They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence:  and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.

He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured.  Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.