he noticed that his boots were very muddy, as if he had walked a long way like a common postman.  He made a joke about this, but they all looked at him as if he had said something wrong, so he hurried out of the room, glad to get away from these people whose looks had no reasonable significance, and whose words had no discoverable meaning.  It had been a bad day, and he hoped mother would let him go back to school the next morning.

And yet though he took off his clothes and got into bed, the day was not quite over.  He had only dozed for a few minutes when he was roused by a noise down below, and slipping out on to the staircase he heard the mill-woman saying good-night in the passage.  When she had gone and the door had banged behind her, he listened still, and heard his mother crying and his father talking on and on in a strange, hoarse voice.  Somehow these incomprehensible sounds made him feel lonely, and he would have liked to have gone downstairs and sat on his mother’s lap and blinked drowsily in his father’s face, as he had done often enough before.  But he was always shy in the presence of strangers, and he felt that he did not know this woman who wept and this man who did not laugh.  His father was his play-friend, the sharer of all his fun; his mother was a quiet woman who sat and sewed, and sometimes told them not to be silly, which was the best joke of all.  It was not right for people to alter.  But the thought of his bedroom made him desolate, and at last he plucked up his courage, and crept downstairs on bare feet.  Father and mother had gone back into the kitchen, and he peeped through the crack of the door to see what they were doing.  Mother was still crying, always crying, but he had to change his position before he could see father.  Then he turned on his heels and ran upstairs trembling with fear and disgust.  For father, the man of all the jokes, the man of whom burglars were afraid and compared with whom all other little boys’ fathers were as dirt, was crying like a little girl.

He jumped into bed and pulled the bedclothes over his face to shut out the ugliness of the world.

III

When Jack woke up the next morning he found that the room was full of sunshine, and that father was standing at the end of the bed.  The moment Jack opened his eyes, he began telling him something in a serious voice, which was alone sufficient to prevent Jack from understanding what he said.  Besides, he used a lot of long words, and Jack thought that it was silly to use long words before breakfast, when nobody could be expected to remember what they meant.  Father’s body neatly fitted the square of the window, and the sunbeams shone in all round it and made it look splendid; and if Jack had not already forgotten the unfortunate impression of the night before, this would have enabled him to overcome it.  Every now and then father stopped to ask him if he understood, and he said he did, hoping to find out what it was all about later