"I will go to them now," he thought, starting up; "there are heaps of time to have a rattling good fight before dinner."
And so there would have been, but—alas! for his good resolutions—as he jumped to his feet something fell out of his pocket. It was the little packet which he had bought last Saturday.
For a moment he hesitated; then down he sat, and picked up the packet.
"I will have just one," he said, "and then go and play with them."
"One" proved to be a cigarette, for cigarettes were what the little packet contained.
Ever since he came home, he had been trying to master the art of smoking, and had not yet succeeded. Each cigarette made him feel worse than before. But with a perseverance worthy of a better cause he would puff steadily on, and try hard to believe that he was enjoying himself.
One or two of the elder boys at his school—Dodds was not among the number—had boasted that they often smoked in the holidays, and Hal had been fired with the idea that it would be a fine thing to be able to say when he went back that he knew how to smoke too.
And this was the secret of much of his altered behaviour, of his mysterious absences, and more than all of his frequent pale looks and irritable moods. The discomfort he felt when the cigarette was actually between his lips was nothing compared to the very disagreeable sensations that always followed. He would feel sick and dizzy, and suffer from a headache for hours afterwards; but as soon as he recovered he would return to the charge and refuse to acknowledge himself beaten.
This morning he met with no better success. He began to feel ill long before he had half finished his first cigarette, and by the time he was half-way through the second the most painful qualms seized him, and forgetting the fort and the fight and everything else in his extreme misery he rolled over on the grass, and spent a most unhappy morning. At dinner-time he crept into the nursery looking so pale and wretched that nurse was really alarmed.