n
your ear.'

And Philip, at the word, _was_ off. He went into the long drawing-room,
and shut the door. Then he got the ivory chessmen out of the Buhl
cabinet, and set them out on that delightful chess-table whose chequers
are of mother-of-pearl and ivory, and tried to play a game, right hand
against left. But right hand, who was white, and so moved first, always
won. He gave up after awhile, and put the chessmen away in their proper
places. Then he got out the big book of photographs of pictures, but
they did not seem interesting, so he tried the ivory spellicans. But his
hand shook, and you know spellicans is a game you can't play when your
hand shakes. And all the time, behind the chess and the pictures and the
spellicans, he was trying not to think about his dream, about how he had
climbed that ladder stair, which was really the yard-stick, and gone
into the cities that he had built on the tables. Somehow he did not want
to remember it. The very idea of remembering made him feel guilty and
wretched.

He went and looked out of the window, and as he stood there his wish not
to remember the dream made his boots restless, and in their shuffling
his right boot kicked against something hard that lay in the folds of
the blue brocade curtain.

He looked down, stooped, and picked up little Mr. Noah. The nurse must
have dropt it there when she cleared away the city.

And as he looked upon those wooden features it suddenly became
impossible not to think of the dream. He let the remembrance of it come,
and it came in a flood. And with it the remembrance of what he had done.
He had promised to be Lucy's noble friend, and they had run together to
escape from the galloping soldiers. And he had run faster than she. And
at the top of the ladder--the ladder of safety--_he had not waited for
her_.

'Any old hero would have waited for her, and let her go first,' he told
himself. 'Any gentleman would--even any _man_--let alone a hero. And I
just bunked down the ladder and forgot her. I _left_ her there.'

Remorse stirred his boots more ungently than before.

'But it was only a dream,' he said. And then remorse said, as he had
felt all along that it would if he only gave it a chance:

'But suppose it wasn't a dream--suppose it was real. Suppose you _did_
leave her there, my noble friend, and that's why she's lost.'

Suddenly Philip felt very small, very forlorn, very much alone in the
world. But Helen would come back. That te