away, she seemed unspeakably dear, faultlessly perfect.

But, left behind, what was he? what did he have? what would become of
him? To all those questions there was only one answer: Nothing. He was
alone with a helpless, childish, old man and that other. "And I've tried
'n' tried!" he protested (he meant that he had tried to please Barber,
tried to do his work better, tried to deserve more consideration from
the longshoreman). And this was what had come of all his striving: Cis
had been driven away.

"Oh, nothin' worse can happen t' me!" he declared despairingly.
"Nothin'! nothin'!" What a staff she had always been, and how much he
had leaned upon that staff, he did not suspect till now, when it was
wrenched from under his hand. He had a fuller understanding, too, of
what a comfort she had steadily been--she, the only bright and beautiful
thing in the dark, poor flat! And to think that, boylike, he had ever
shrunk out from under her caressing fingers, or fled from her proffered
kiss! O his darling comrade and friend! O little mother and sister in
one!

"Cis!" he faltered. "Cis!"

An almost intolerable sense of loss swept him, like a wave brimming the
cup of his grief. His forehead seemed to be bulging, as if it would
burst. His heart was bursting, too. And something was tearing, clawlike,
at his throat and at his vitals. Just where the lower end of his
breastbone left off was the old, awful, aching, gnawing, "gone" feeling.
Much in his short life he had found hard to bear; but never anything so
appalling as this! If only he might cry a little!

"Sir Gawain, he c-cried," he remembered, "when he found out he was
f-fightin' his own b-brother. And Sir G-Gareth, he c-cried too." Also,
no law of the twelve in the Handbook forbade a scout to weep.

His eyes closed, his mouth lengthened out pathetically, his cheeks
puckered, his chin drew up grotesquely, trembling as if tortured; then
he bent his head and began to sob, terribly, yet silently, for he feared
to waken Grandpa. Down his hurt face streamed the tears, to fall on the
big, old shirt, and on his feet, while he leaned against the door-jamb,
a drooping, shaking, broken-hearted little figure.

"Oh, I can't git along without her!" he whispered. "I can't stand it!
Oh, I want her back! I want her back!"

When he had cried away the sharp edge of his grief, a deliciously sad
mood came over him. In _The Legends of King Arthur_, more than one
grieving person had succumb