om was close under the roof and that was close under the elm
boughs; all hours he could hear them finger it with soft rustling
touches. The bed was pulled to the window that gave upon the downslope
of the hill; at the foot of it one saw the white bloom-faces of the
alders lift and bow above the folded leaves, and the rising of the river
damp across the pastures. All the light reflected from the sky above
Bloombury wood was no more than enough to make a glimmer on the glass of
a picture that hung at the foot of Peter's bed. It served to show the
gilt of the narrow frame and the soft black of the print upon which
Peter had looked so many times that he thought now he was still seeing
it as he lay staring in the dusk--a picture of a young man in bright
armour with loosened hair, riding down a particularly lumpy and swollen
dragon. Flames came out of the creature's mouth in the immemorial
fashion of dragons, but the young man was not hurt by them. He sat there
lightly, his horse curvetting, his lance thrust down the dragon's throat
and coming out of the back of his head, doing a great deed easily, the
way people like to think of great things being done. It was a very
narrow picture, so narrow that you might think that it had something to
do with the dragon's doubling on himself and the charger's forefeet
being up in the air to keep within the limits of the frame, and the
exclusion from it of the Princess whom, as his father had told him the
story, the young knight George had rescued from those devouring jaws. It
came out now, quite clearly, that she must have had cheeks as red as
June apples and eyes like the pools of spring rain in Bloombury wood,
and her not being there in the picture was only a greater security for
her awaiting him at this moment in the House with the Shining Walls.

There was, for the boy still staring at it through the dusk, something
particularly personal in the picture, for ever since his father had
died, three years ago, Peter had had a dragon of his own to fight. Its
name was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from
which it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and
Ellen and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth
stopped with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious
days to scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden
turned out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way
of a payment on the