Finally he went on to the remaining chapters of the book, always with that double sense of knowing it all before and of not quite grasping what he read.
Pages were consumed before he realized with a shock more intense than any one previously experienced, that the book was speaking of the game he learned to play back of the big rock.
Again it was not what the book told that seemed to matter, but the tone in which it spoke. And while before that tone had sent the blood to his head, it now drew every drop of it back to his heart until he shivered and shook with a misery so acute that another moment's endurance of it seemed unthinkable.
At that instant fear was born within him. Until then it had been no more real to him than were now the experiences described in the first part of the book. He had instinctively shrunk from things that he knew or believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word. He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the danger it heralds.
He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and what is worse than death. And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced, sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory. But the image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly within the black boards of a coffin. What he saw and what froze him with horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted a living man.
Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment by powers not within his actual ken, was the book's damning imputation of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that no words could adequately picture it.
All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually experienced so far. He wanted to refuse belief. He sought for escapes as if the fulfilment of the doom pronounced by the book had been a matter of minutes. But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a line of experiences out of his own life.
Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good cause for refusal. Perhaps, after all, it was not his father's position but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way. Perhaps Dally had reasons for not letting him become primus which, out of his soul's kindness, he never told even to Keith himself. Perhaps the reason he always felt isolated and out of touch with his schoolmates lay in their instinctive recognition of his nature....
In the end he replaced the book with a firm determination never to look at it again. But the poison was in his mind, and the book no longer mattered.