Another. No one to play with any more. Never to be able to pretend
again that one was just like everyone else. People drawing away and
saying to each other, "He's not a nice little boy!"

"Please--please, don't, Robert!"

"Why not? They're only weeds--beastly, ugly things."

"They've not done you any harm. It's a shame to hurt them. I like
them."

"They're no good. It's practice. I'm a soldier. I'm cutting the
enemy to pieces."

A red rage was mounting in him. He hardly knew that she had stood up
until he saw her face gleaming at him through the mist. She was whiter
than ever, and her eyes had lost their distant look and blazed with an
anger profounder, more deadly, than his own.

"You shan't!"

"Shan't I?"

She caught the descending stick. He tried to tear it from her, and
they fought each other almost in silence, except for the sound of their
quick, painful breath. He grew frantic, twisting and writhing. He
began to curse her as his father cursed Christine. But her slim brown
wrists were like steel. And suddenly, looking into her eyes he saw
that she wasn't angry now. She knew that she was stronger than he.
She was just sorry for him, for everything.

He dropped the stick. He turned on his heel, gulping hard.

"I don't fight with girls," he said.

He walked away steadily with his head up. He did not once look back at
her. But as he climbed the hill he seemed to himself to grow smaller
and smaller, more and more tired and lonely. He had lost her. He
would never play with her again. The Brothers Banditti had gone each
to his home. They sat by the fireside with their people, and were nice
children. To-morrow they would play just as though nothing had
happened. And Francey would be there, dancing in and out----

He stumbled a little. The hiccoughs were definitely sobs, hard-drawn,
shaking him from head to foot. It was his birthday. And at the bottom
of the hill, hidden in evening mist, the big dark house waited for him.

4

There was light showing in the dining-room window, so that he knew his
father had come home. At that all his sorrow and sense of a grievous
wrong done to him was swallowed up in abject physical terror. Even
later in life, when things had shrunk into reasonable proportions, it
was difficult for him to see his father as others had seen him, as an
unhappy not unlovable man, gifted with an erratic genius which had been
perverted into an amazing facility