She let him go then, even assisting him from behind out of the pantry window. He had a look and a smile at her before he dropped on the other side. She looked so queer, with her crabbed face and untidy hair, under the jumping candle. She nodded to him grimly.
Soon he was at his own window and through it. Not a sound in the house. He crept up the stairs. The same wild snore met him, rumbling like the sleeping soul of the house. Everything the same. To him all those terrors and alarms, and they had slept as though it had been one moment of time.
He opened his own door. Hamlet’s even, whining breathing met him. Not much of a watchdog. Never mind. How tired he was! How tired! He flung off his clothes, stood for a moment to feel the cold air on his naked body, then his nightshirt was over his head.
The bed was lovely, lovely, lovely. Only as he sank down a silver slope into a sea of red and purple leaves a thought went sliding with him. The Dean’s Ernest had funked it! The Dean’s Ernest had funked it! Let us never forget! Let us . . . Plunk!
CHAPTER VII
YOUNG BALTIMORE
I
Jeremy was miserable. He was sitting on the high ground above the cricket field. The warm summer air wrapped him as though in a cloak; at his feet the grass was bright shrill green, then as it fell away it grew darker, tumbling into purple shadow as it curved to the flattened plateau. Behind him the wood was like a wall of painted steel. Far away the figures of the cricketers were white dolls moving against the bright red brick of the school buildings. One little white cloud shaped like an elephant, like a rent torn in the blue canvas of the sky, hung motionless above his head; and he watched this, waiting for it to lengthen, to fade into another shape, formless, until at last, shredded into scraps of paper, it vanished. He watched the cloud and thought: “I’d like to roll him down the hill and never see him again.”
He was thinking of young Baltimore, who was sitting close to him. He was doing nothing but stare and let his mouth hang slackly open. Because he did nothing so often was one of the reasons why Jeremy hated him so deeply. Baltimore was not an attractive-looking boy. He was perhaps ten years of age, white faced, sandy haired, furtive eyed, with two pimples on his forehead and one on his nose. He looked as though quite recently he had been rolled in the mud. And that was true. He had been.
From near at hand, from the outskirts of the wood, shrill cries could be heard singing:
“Stocky had a little lamb,