smile. He held his head erect and looked ahead of him as if in the
far, far distance he had seen something, a beckoning something,
toward which he was to strive. Barefooted Peter, poverty-stricken,
lonely Peter for the first time glimpsed the purple heights.




CHAPTER II

THE PROMISE


It is written in the Live Green Book that one may not stumble upon
one of its secrets without at the same discovering something about
others quite as fascinating and worth exploring. This is a wise and
blessed law, which the angels of the Little Peoples are always
trying to have enforced. Peter Champneys suspected the Red Admiral
of being a fairy; so when he ran fleet-footed over the fields and
through the woods and alongside the worm-fences after the Admiral,
the angels of the Little Peoples turned his boyish head aside and
made him see birds' wings, and bees, and the shapes of leaves, and
the colors of trees and clouds, and the faces of flowers. It is
further written that one may not intimately know the Little Peoples
without loving them. When one begins to love, one begins to grow.
Peter, then, was growing.

Lying awake in the dark now wasn't a thing to be dreaded; the dark
was no longer filled with shapes of fear, for Peter was beginning to
discover in himself a power of whose unique and immense value he was