lying face downwards on the grass,
gave himself over hand and foot to fancy. It was quite late in the
afternoon when appetite brought him to himself. He had forgotten his
dinner, but relying on his ability to filch something, he walked home
with a light heart He marched innocently through the open door of the
shop.

'Paul!' His father stopped him, his spectacles tipped up into his white
hair, and his gray eyes half hidden under eyebrows like a shaggy
Scotch deer-hound's. The portrait of Sir Walter's 'Maida' had a strong
suggestion of the Scottish face, wistful, affectionate, and full of
simple sagacity. Just now the gray eyes looked doom. Paul knew he had
done something awful, and felt guilty, though he knew nothing as yet
of the charge against him. 'What ha' ye dune wi' the threepenny-bit ye
stole this morning?'

'What threepenny-bit?' said Paul. 'I haven't seen no threepenny-bit,
father.'

The verse he hammered out in his lonely moments was grammatical, because
his exemplars would have it so; but to have been grammatical in common
speech would have seemed like a pedantry.

'The threepenny-bit your mother put on the clock-ledge, ye pelferin'
vag'bond!' said his father sternly.

'I never seen it,' Paul declared.

'There, there!' said Armstrong; 'it comes natural to lie, and I'll not
tempt ye. Not another word. Ye'll go to your chamber, and ye'll stop
there till ye're in the mind to confess. There's the fruits of
your crime marked on your lips this minute, and Dick saw ye at the
sweet-stuff shop. Away with ye, before I lay hands on ye!'

Paul's hob-nailed boots went lingeringly up the uncarpeted stairs to
the attic room, and there he spent the long, long afternoon. There was
nothing to do, nothing to think about, nothing to read. He stared at the
tinman's shop opposite, and at the cheesemonger's fat widow, and at the
window of the Berlin wool shop next door to the cheesemonger's, and
when a customer went in he speculated idly on his purchase. He was very
hungry and lonely and dull, and the three other attic rooms which were
open to him were as uninteresting as his own. Evening came on, and he
seemed to be forgotten. He took off his boots, and crept to the lower
flight of stairs and listened. Everything was going on just as it would
have done if he had not been alone and miserable and martyred Well, he
could starve and die and go to heaven, and then perhaps they would all
be sorry, and discover some little good