it was his own domain.
He felt in it a certain pride of possession. The hollow under the lee
of the rubbish-heap, by the side of the hole where he kept his paper
library, was the most homelike place he knew.

For many years he remembered that day. The light that never was on sea
or land fell upon the brickfield. He had read the story at one stretch.
He had sat there for hours reading, for hours rapt in his Vision. At
last material darkness began to gather round him, and he awoke with a
start to realization that he had been sitting there most of the day.
With a sigh he replaced his book in the hole, which he cunningly masked
with a lump of hard clay, and, feeling stiff and cold, ran, childlike,
homeward. In the silence of the night he took out his cornelian heart
and fondled it. The day had been curiously like, yet utterly unlike,
the day on which she had taken it from her neck. In a dim fashion he
knew that the two days were of infinite significance in his life and
were complementary. He had been waiting, as it were, for nine months
for this day's revelation, this day's confirmation.

Paul rose the next morning, a human being with a fixed idea, an
unquestioned faith in his destiny. His star shone clear. He was born to
great things. In those early years that followed it was not a matter of
an imaginative child's vanity, but the unalterable, serene conviction
of a child's soul. The prince and princess were realities, his future
greatness a magnificent certitude. You must remember this, if you would
understand Paul's after-life. It was built on this radiant knowledge.
In the afternoon he met Billy Goodge and the gang. They were playing at
soldiers, Billy distinguished by a cocked hat made out of newspaper and
a wooden sword.

"Coom on, Susie, wi be going to knock hell out of the boys in Stamford
Street."

Paul folded his arms and looked at him contemptuously, as became one of
his noble blood. "You could no' knock hell out of a bug."

"What's that tha says?"

Paul repeated the insult.

"Say that agen!" blustered the cocked-hatted leader.

Paul said it again and nothing happened, Billy received vociferous and
sanguinary advice couched in sanguinary terms.

"Try and hit me!" said Billy.

The scene was oddly parallel with one in the story of the outcast boy
of the gutter. Paul, conscious of experiment, calmly went up to him and
kicked him. He kicked him hard. The sensation was delicious. Billy
edged away. He knew