The boy was the first to rise to look for his fishing-rod, and he was surprised to find no six-pounder at the end of it.  “She has broke the line again!” he said; for he was sure then and ever afterwards that a big one had pulled him in.

Corp slapped him for his ingratitude; but the man who had saved this boy’s life wanted no thanks.  “Off to your home with you, wherever it is,” he said to the boy, who obeyed silently; and then to Corp:  “He is a little fool, Corp, but not such a fool as I am.”  He lay on his face, shivering, not from cold, not from shock, but in a horror of himself.  I think it may fairly be said that he had done a brave if foolhardy thing; it was certainly to save the boy that he had jumped, and he had given himself a moment’s time in which to draw back if he chose, which vastly enhances the merit of the deed.  But sentimentality had been there also, and he was now shivering with a presentiment of the length to which it might one day carry him.

They lit a fire among the rocks, at which he dried his clothes, and then they set out for home, Corp doing all the talking.  “What a town there will be about this in Thrums!” was his text; and he was surprised when Tommy at last broke silence by saying passionately:  “Never speak about this to me again, Corp, as long as you live.  Promise me that.  Promise never to mention it to anyone.  I want no one to know what I did to-day, and no one will ever know unless you tell; the boy can’t tell, for we are strangers to him.”

“He thinks you are a Captain Ure, and that I’m Alexander Bett, his servant,” said Corp.  “I telled him that for a divert.”

“Then let him continue to think that.”

Of course Corp promised.  “And I’ll go to the stake afore I break my promise,” he swore, happily remembering one of the Jacobite oaths.  But he was puzzled.  They would make so much of Tommy if they knew.  They would think him a wonder.  Did he not want that?

“No,” Tommy replied.

“You used to like it; you used to like it most michty.”

“I have changed.”

“Ay, you have; but since when?  Since you took to making printed books?”

Tommy did not say, but it was more recently than that.  What he was surrendering no one could have needed to be told less than he; the magnitude of the sacrifice was what enabled him to make it.  He was always at home among the superlatives; it was the little things that bothered him.  In his present fear of the ride that sentimentality might yet goad him to, he craved for mastery over self; he knew that his struggles with his Familiar usually ended in an embrace, and he had made a passionate vow that it should be so no longer.  The best beginning of the new man was to deny himself the glory that would be his if his deed were advertised to the world.  Even Grizel must never know of it—­Grizel, whose admiration was so dear to him.  Thus he punished himself, and again I think he deserves respect.