ragon was dead. No
one could frighten them again.

"Aren't we ever coming back, Christine?"

"No, dear, I don't think so."

He looked back at the grim, high house. For a moment a sorrow as deep
as joy rushed over him. It was as though he knew that something
besides the Dragon had died up there in that dimly lit room--as though
he were saying good-bye to something he would never find, though he
hunted the world over.

He had been a little boy. He would never be quite a little boy again.

Or perhaps the Dragon wasn't dead at all--perhaps Dragons never died,
but lived on and on, hiding in secret places, waiting to pounce out on
you and drag you back.

He seized Christine's hand.

"Let's run," he whispered. "Let's run fast."

II

1

He discovered that there were people in the world who could make scenes
without noise. They were like the crocodiles he had met on his visit
to the Zoo, lying malignantly inert in their oily water. But one
twitch of the tail, one blink of a lightless eye, was more terrifying
than the roar of a lion.

No one made a noise in Christine's home. The two sisters looked at
Robert as though he were a small but disagreeable smell that they tried
politely to ignore. They asked him if he wanted a second helping in
voices of glacial courtesy. They said things to each other and at
Christine which were quiet and deadly as the rustle of a snake in the
grass. Robert had never fled from his father as he fled from their
restrained disgust. He had never been more aware of storm than in the
smother of the heavily carpeted, decorously silent rooms. It broke,
three days later, not with thunder and lightning, but with the brief
malicious rattle of a machine-gun.

"You ought not to have brought him here. You have no pride. But,
then, you never had. At least some consideration for our feelings
might have been expected. We have suffered enough. If you knew what
people said---- Mrs. Stonehouse has been talking. She offered to
take the child. As his natural guardian she had the right. An
unpardonable, undignified interference----"

Christine hardly answered. Her fragile face wore the look of quiet
obstinacy which had braved James Stonehouse and the worst disasters.
Robert had seen it too often not to understand. But now his father was
dead, and instead; inexplicably, he had become the source of trouble.
He disgraced Christine. Her people hated her because she was good to
hi