It was June. I found him lying in the hayfield, quite still, on his face with the long flowering grasses and the buttercups above his head.
I had known something was the matter, but I did not know what it was. I was up in our house in the Happy Tree, and I knew suddenly that something had happened bad, that Hugo was in trouble. I came down from the tree and looked for him, and for a long time I could not find him. I looked for him in the Walled Garden, by the Frog Pond, in the Ruin; I knew he was not in the wood; then I went down to the stream and walked along it; and then I began to wonder if Hugo was dead. Then as I came back from the stream I found him, lying like that, in the long grass.
I sat down beside him in the long grass and asked him what had happened, and at first he did not answer.
Two white butterflies were chasing each other backwards and forwards over his head. The buttercups nodded and swayed in the faint wind, and the soft, feathery heads of the grass.
They touched against my cheek, too, as I sat there, squatting on my knees. They were almost as tall as I was.
I bent down and touched him and spoke to him again.
“I am going to school in the autumn,” Hugo said at last, and his voice sounded muffled as though it came from a long way off, and was not his.
It was like being shot—like the world stopping. I sat straight up again; even so the grass came level with my head.
I could not realize it at first; it seemed too dreadful to believe; and then a blind resistance came over me, an unreasoning impulse to protect him from this unbearable thing. I felt much older and stronger than Hugo and very fierce.
I snuggled down beside him and put my arm round his neck. He seemed suddenly very little and helpless, with no one in the world to protect him except me.