ed. Suddenly a ray
of hope darts through him, and he feigns sleep. His heart labours,
but he keeps his breath regular by a great effort. Mother gazes for a
minute, and goes away on tiptoe. There is quiet for five minutes, and
Paul is back in fairyland. But mother is here again on tiptoe, and the
voice of doom sounds on his ear.

'I thought you was foxing, you little beast!'

Then Paul takes his thrashing as well as he can, aiming to receive most
of it on his elbows, and is in bitter disgrace for days and days. The
phenomenally guilty and degraded young ruffian who _acted_ a lie!---a
far viler thing, it would seem, than to speak one!

This is the worst of the household, to the Solitary's mind, that all
combine in prolonged reprobation for any crime of his. He has no memory
for Dick's offences or Jack's or David's; but Dick and Jack and David
are unforgetting, and the girls sniff unutterable holiness and contempt.
He knows he is a liar, and he knows that liars have their portion in
that awful lake, but he is high-spirited and fanciful, and he forgets,
sealing his doom weekly at the least, and making it more sure. This
reputation of liar began when Wombwell's Menagerie of Wild Beasts first
visited the parish, and the neighbourhood of lions and tigers so flushed
his imagination that he saw them everywhere. He came home one day with
a story of a tiger running away with the shop-shutters of a neighbouring
grocer on his back. He was chastised for this gratuitous unwarrantable
yarn, and stuck to it Perhaps he had dreamed it and believed it true,
but on that point memory was silent. Anyway it was fixed and decided
that he was a liar, and 'A liar we can ne'er believe, though he
should speak the thing that's true.' So nobody believed Paul under any
conditions, not even when truth was crystalline.

He was a little older, a very little older, and he lay in bed one
moonlight night in summer. He had been to chapel that Sunday evening,
and the Rev. Roderic Murchison had preached a sermon from the text, 'To
depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.' Paul's small soul
was filled to the brim with a sort of yearning peace. The moon yearned
at him through the uncurtained window of the bare attic chamber, and he
longed back to it. Oh how sweet, how sweet to pass to peace for ever, to
lie asleep for ever, with the grass and the daisies for a counterpane,
and yet to be somewhere and wideawake and happy! 'Suffer little children
to