ly, because his heart was in his mouth and the policeman looked as
though he had seen it there. And he overshot the mark in the motor
omnibus through being ashamed to ask again, only alighting at Albert Gate;
but here there was quite a little stream of decent people to follow
without further tremors into the indubitable Park.

He followed them across the drive and across Rotten Row, gaining
confidence as he went. In a minute it was all delightful; his eyes were
turned outward by all there was to see; and now his chief fear was lest
some one or other of the several passers should stand in his path and ask
what he was doing there. He was still afraid of speaking or being spoken
to, but no longer unreasonably so. Detection as an escaped schoolboy was
his one great dread; he felt he was doing something for which he might be
expelled.

But nobody took any notice of him; this gradually encouraged him to take
more notice of other people, when he found, not altogether to his
surprise, that the majority of those passing through the Park at that late
hour were hardly of his own class. So much the more infinitesimal were
the chances of his being recognised or even suspected for what he was.
There were young men in straw hats, there were red-coated soldiers, and
there were girls. They all filled the schoolboy with their fascinating
possibilities. They were Life. The boy's heart beat at what he heard and
saw. The couples were hilarious and unrefined. One wench, almost under
his nose, gave her soldier a slap with such a remark as Pocket had never
heard from a woman's lips before. He turned away, tingling, and leant
upon the parapet of a bridge he had been in the act of crossing, and
thought of school and home and Mr. Coverley.

It was not really a bridge at all. It was only the eastern extremity of
the Serpentine; but as the boy leant over the stone balustrade, and gazed
upon the artificial flood, broadening out indefinitely in the darkness, it
might have been the noblest river in the world. Its banks were muffled in
a feather boa of trees, bedizened by a chain of many lights; the lights of
a real bridge made a diadem in the distance; and between these sped the
lamps of invisible vehicles, like fretful fireflies. And the still water
gave back every glimmer with its own brilliance, unchallenged and undimmed
by moon or star, for not a trace of either was in the sky; and yet it was
the most wonderful sky the boy had ever s