nt my mother!" like a little boy who had been left in the
street, and at the other, "You shan't have her! You shan't have her!" as
though someone were trying to steal his Toy-Village or Hamlet away from
him. His sleepy, bemused, heated brain wandered, in dazed fashion, back
to his father's sermon of that morning. Abraham and Isaac! Abraham and
Isaac!

Abraham and Isaac! Suddenly, as though through the flaming glass
something had been flung to him, an idea came. Perhaps God, that huge,
ugly God was teasing the Coles just as once He had teased Abraham.
Perhaps He wished to see whether they were truly obedient as the
Jampot had sometimes wished in the old days. He was only, it might be,
pretending. Perhaps He was demanding that one of them should give up
something--something of great value. Even Jeremy, himself!...

If he had to sacrifice something to save his mother, what would be the
hardest sacrifice? Would it be his Toy-Village, or Mary or Helen, or
his soldiers, or his paint-box, or his gold fish that he had in a bowl,
or--No, of course, he had known from the first what would be hardest--it
would, of course, be Hamlet.

At this stage in his thinking he removed his arm from Hamlet's neck and
looked at the animal. At the same moment the light that had filled the
glass-house with a fiery radiance that burnt to the very heart of the
place was clouded. Above, in the sky, black, smoky clouds, rolling in
fold after fold, as though some demon were flinging them out across the
sky as one flings a carpet, piled up and up, each one darker than the
last. The light vanished; the conservatory was filled with a thick,
murky glow, and far across the fields, from the heart of the black wood,
came the low rumble of thunder. But Jeremy did not hear that; he was
busy with his thoughts. He stared at the dog, who was lying stretched
out on the dirty floor, his nose between his toes. It cannot truthfully
be said that the resolve that was forming in Jeremy's head had its birth
in any fine, noble idealisms. It was as though some bully, seizing his
best marbles, had said: "I'll give you these back if you hand over this
week's pocket-money!" His attitude to the bully could not truthfully be
described as one of homage or reverence; rather was it one of anger and
impotent rebellion.

He loved Hamlet, and he loved his mother more than Hamlet; but he was
not moved by sentiment. Grimly, his legs apart, his eyes shut tight, as
they were when he s