“What are you doing here, you rascal?” he spluttered. “How dare you come here? Who the devil are you?”
The little beggar-lad looked him full in the face, and did not budge an inch.
“My name is Truth,” he said; “and I am here to knock down your House of Lies!”
Whereupon he raised his little child’s hand—and lo! without any sound at all, but as rapidly as a heap of snow melting away in hot sunshine, the house that Jack built with so much care and concern crumbled to atoms and disappeared, leaving no trace of itself but a faint bad smell like the passing of an open dust-cart.
Now some people passing by looked at the blank space where it had once stood, and said: “Dear me! There used to be a House of Lies here, and everybody thought it would last for ever!”
“Not everybody,” said the little beggar-lad, as he stepped out among them: “only the Jack that built it!”
And with that he also disappeared.
And where was Jack? What had become of him? Well, he had fallen with the ruin of his House—and he must have died in a very strange and awful fashion; for just near the dust of the two first Lies he had set together in boyhood as a foundation for the after-building of his life there was seen a crawling Worm, writhing itself in and out through the wet mould. And the Worm was the coward Soul of a false lad who never became a true Man!
