"Then ease those bolts away. Gently, Piper!"
The old man opened quietly.
A sweet wind stole in, and with it a flood of light.
Kit peeped out.
How naked it looked, how terrible!
"One moment."
He bent, untied his shoe-lace, and tied it up again.
Upstairs it had seemed such an easy thing to dare this deed, so full of the poetry and romance of war. Down here, face to face with the bare fact, it was a different matter. A plank, as it were, had been thrust out from solid earth over Eternity; it was his to walk that plank; and he didn't like the job.
Piper held the door, waiting respectfully. The old man's sleeves were rolled to the arm-pit. On one hairy fore-arm a dancing-girl was tattooed, record of the days, now forty years since, before, in his own simple phrase, he had larned Christ.
He knew no fear himself: for he knew that he was impregnable. But his heart went out to this slip of a lad, who had to face Eternity alone, and found it terrible.