whimpering, and wondering, perhaps, a little inwardly that the sky did
not fall in and crush me and the wicked world altogether.

A boy's mind is a turbulent place enough, and stuffed pretty often with
a legion of wicked thoughts, which take possession of his fancy long
before evil words and evil deeds have struck up their alliance. Yet even
the most foul-mouthed boy thinks, I believe, nobly, or with a kind of
nobility, of his first love, and a clean-hearted lad offers her a kind
of bewildering worship. I was a clean-hearted lad, and I had worshipped
Barbara; and now my worship was over and done with, and I made sure that
my heart was broken.

I do not know how long I lay there, with whirling brain and bursting
heart, but presently I felt the touch of a hand on my shoulder. I had
heard no one coming, and under ordinary conditions I might have been a
thought startled by the unexpected companionship; but just now I was too
wretched for any other emotion, and I merely lay passive and
indifferent.

The hand declined with a firmer pressure and gently shook my shoulder,
and then a voice--Lancelot Amber's voice--called softly to me asking me
what I was doing there and what ailed me. I always loved Lancelot's
voice: it seemed to vary as swiftly as wind over water with every
thought, and to run along all the chords of speech with the perfection
of music in a dream. Whenever I read that saying of St. Paul's about the
tongue of men and of angels I am reminded of Lancelot's voice, and I
feel convinced that of such is the language of the courts of heaven, and
that if St. Paul had talked like Lancelot he would have won the most
sceptical. The sound of his voice soothed me then, as far as it was
possible for anything to soothe me, and I shifted slightly to one side
and looked up at him furtively and crossly, my poor face all blubbered
with tears and smeared with mire where I had lain grovelling.

Bit by bit I told him my story. I was in the temper for a confession,
and ready to tell my tale to anyone with wit enough to coax it from me.
Perhaps it did not seem so much of a tale in the telling, though to my
mind it was then as terrible as the end of the world itself and the
unloosening of the great deep.

So I hunched myself up on my left elbow, and, staring drearily at
Lancelot through my tears, I whimpered out my sorrows; and he listened
with a smileless face.

When I had done, and my quavering broke off with a sob, he was sile