those of poor rogues do on the gallows, and I was chickenish enough to
wish to blubber. And while I stood there, stockish and stupid, the pair
became aware of me. I do not think I made any noise, but their eyes
dropped from each other and turned on me, and the man scowled a little,
without loosening his hold, but the woman, no whit troubled, flung one
arm away from her lover's neck and held out her hand to me, with a
laugh, and greeted me merrily.

'Why, it's little Raphael!' she said, laughing the words into the yellow
beard of the sea-thief who clipped her, and again she nodded at me, in
no ways discomposed by the strangeness of her position. But I, poor
fool, could not bear it, and I turned and ran down the stairs as if the
Devil himself were after me.

CHAPTER V

LANCELOT LEAVES

There was a place upon the downs to which it was often my special
delight to betake me--a kind of hollow dip between two humps of hills,
where a lad might lie warm in the windiest weather and look straight out
upon the sea, shining with calm or shaggy with storm, and feel quite as
if he were alone in the world. To this place I now sped half
unconsciously, my face, I make no doubt, scarlet with passion and shame,
and my eyes well-nigh blinded with sudden up-springing of tears. How I
got to my hollow I do not know, but I ran and ran and ran, with my blood
tingling, heedless of all the world, until at last I found myself
tumbling down over its ridged wall or rampart of hummocks and dropping,
with a choking moan, flat on my face in an agony of despair.

There I lay in the long grasses, sobbing as if my heart would break.
Indeed, I thought that it was breaking; that life was over for me; that
sunrise and sunset and the glory of the stars had no further part to
play for me; and that all that was left for me was to die, and be put
into a corner somewhere and speedily forgotten.

Troops of bitter thoughts came surging up over my brain. My mood of mind
and state of body were alike incomprehensible and terrible to me. It was
a very real agony, that fierce awakening to the realities of life, to
love and passion, and blinding jealousy and despair, and all the rest of
the torments that walk in the train of a boy's first love. I wallowed
there a long time, making a great mark in the soft grasses, as if I
sought to measure myself for an untimely grave. The strong afternoon sun
drove on his way westward, and still I lay there, writhing and