t was not what the book told that seemed to matter, but the tone
in which it spoke. And while before that tone had sent the blood to his
head, it now drew every drop of it back to his heart until he shivered
and shook with a misery so acute that another moment's endurance of it
seemed unthinkable.

At that instant fear was born within him. Until then it had been no more
real to him than were now the experiences described in the first part of
the book. He had instinctively shrunk from things that he knew or
believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh
word. He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and
restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark
unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible
character of the danger it heralds.

He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and
what is worse than death. And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced,
sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory. But the
image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly
within the black boards of a coffin. What he saw and what froze him with
horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and
bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted
a living man.

Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment
by powers not within his actual ken, was the book's damning imputation
of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that
no words could adequately picture it.

All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against
conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually
experienced so far. He wanted to refuse belief. He sought for escapes as
if the fulfilment of the doom pronounced by the book had been a matter
of minutes. But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a
line of experiences out of his own life.

Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good
cause for refusal. Perhaps, after all, it was not his father's position
but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of
Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way. Perhaps Dally
had reasons for not letting him become _primus_ which, out of his soul's
kindness, he never told even to Keith himself. Perhaps the reason he
always felt isolated and out of touch with his scho