tle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from
the ceiling--yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding
spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb--an all-pervading
thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and
part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or
spirit he conceived to be God--the more as it came to him in a flash of
divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark
of the Covenant.

Thus the Front Room became what "Heaven" meant to him when he heard the
word--a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it
actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very
joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart;
a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously
pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games
and sweets and joyous idleness.

The word "God," then, became at this time a word of evil import to the
littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath
morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie's,
with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who,
clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in
front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely,
like very princes.

To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her
permission, "Oh, it must be awful, _awful_ wicked--because I want to do
it very, very much!--not like, going to church."

Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation--particularly when
Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the
care-free Sabbath loafers.

Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come
to the Feet before he died. "But I believe he _will_ come to the Feet,"
she added, "even if it's on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat
standing on his brow. It would make a lovely tract--him coming to the
Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything."

The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn't come to the
Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn't, and if you
could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During
church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago,
it seemed, he had been with his