He dropped the stick.  He turned on his heel, gulping hard.

“I don’t fight with girls,” he said.

He walked away steadily with his head up.  He did not once look back at her.  But as he climbed the hill he seemed to himself to grow smaller and smaller, more and more tired and lonely.  He had lost her.  He would never play with her again.  The Brothers Banditti had gone each to his home.  They sat by the fireside with their people, and were nice children.  To-morrow they would play just as though nothing had happened.  And Francey would be there, dancing in and out——­

He stumbled a little.  The hiccoughs were definitely sobs, hard-drawn, shaking him from head to foot.  It was his birthday.  And at the bottom of the hill, hidden in evening mist, the big dark house waited for him.

4

There was light showing in the dining-room window, so that he knew his father had come home.  At that all his sorrow and sense of a grievous wrong done to him was swallowed up in abject physical terror.  Even later in life, when things had shrunk into reasonable proportions, it was difficult for him to see his father as others had seen him, as an unhappy not unlovable man, gifted with an erratic genius which had been perverted into an amazing facility for living on other people’s money, and cursed with the temper of a maniac.  To Robert Stonehouse his father was from first to last the personification of nightmare.

He stood now in the deep shadow of the porch, trying to make up his mind to ring the bell.  His legs and arms had become ice-cold and refused to move.  There did not seem to be anything alive in him except his heart, which was beating all over him, in his throat and head and body, with a hundred terrible little hammers.  He thought of the Prince in the story which Christine had read aloud to him.  The Prince, who was a fine and dashing fellow, had gone straight to the black enchanted cave where the dragon lived, and had thumped on the door with the hilt of his gold sword and shouted:  “Open, Sesame!” And when the door opened, he had gone straight in, without turning a hair, and slain the dragon and rescued the Princess.

Somehow the story did not make him braver.  He had no sword, and his clothes were not of the finest silk threaded with gold.  He was a small boy in a patched sailor-suit, with a bandage round his head and a dirty face—­cold, hungry and buffeted by a day of storms.  He wished he could stay there in the shadow until he died, and never have to fight anyone again, or screw himself to face his father, or live through any more rows.  But it seemed you didn’t die just because you wanted to.  All that happened was that you grew colder and more miserable, knowing that the row would be a great deal worse when it came.  Goaded by this reasoning, he crept down the area steps to the back door which, by a merciful chance, had been left unlocked, and made his way on tiptoe along the dark stone passage to the kitchen.