Wilberforce, dazzling and again dazzling the lighted avenues opening now
before him; there is nothing, nothing, from the rendings of the toys to
the deliberate defiance of his nurse and all those in authority over
him, that he shall not now perform.... With a cry, with a wild wave of
the arms, with a sickening foretaste of the bump with which the gay
brown carpet would mark him, he was down, the Fates were upon him--the
disturbance, the disrobing, the darkness. Nevertheless, even as he was
carried, sobbing, into the farther room, there went with him a
consciousness that life would never again be quite the dull,
purposeless, monotonous thing that it had hitherto been.


II

After a long time he was alone. About him the room, save for the yellow
night-light above his head, was dark, humped with shadows, with grey
pools of light near the windows, and a golden bar that some lamp beyond
the house flung upon the wall. Ernest Henry lay and, now and again,
cautiously felt the bump on his forehead; there was butter on the bump,
and an interesting confusion and pain and importance round and about it.
Ernest Henry's eyes sought the golden bar, and then, lingering there,
looked back upon the recent adventure. He had walked; yes, he had
walked. This would, indeed, be something to tell his Friend.

His friend, he knew, would be very shortly with him. It was not every
night that he came, but always, before his coming, Ernest Henry knew of
his approach--knew by the happy sense of comfort that stole softly about
him, knew by the dismissal of all those fears and shapes and terrors
that, otherwise, so easily beset him. He sucked his thumb now, and felt
his bump, and stared at the ceiling and knew that he would come. During