rs above her
left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.

I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the
dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were
stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in
another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation
had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human
pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his
arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child
fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.

There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down,
tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The
audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena.
I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken
in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was
rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had
fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him,
his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.

People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and
scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had
seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phoebus, and
bore him in my arms to my mother's house.

She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and
more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes
she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said,
and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the
dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and
rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow
curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she
said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their
sport. It was cruel."

I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him--the little
fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and
along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and
chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms
to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like
a king. Poor little dead Phoebus! It was true what my mother had said:
the pe