was hungry again, and bethought him of the remnant
of the sponge loaf. Nothing much worse than had already happened
could befall him, and after brief temptation he kicked off his unlaced
hobnails and stole downstairs. With some such vague idea of disguising
crime as a thievish monkey might have had, he packed up a pair of
neatly folded towels in the paper which had once held the loaf, and so
retreated to his prison. All day long the familiar noises of the
house, exaggerated into importance by his own loneliness, went on. Feet
travelled here and there, voices called, the tingling shop-bell rang.
The little servant came to make the bed, and treated him with the
disdain which befitted a convicted criminal. In a while she went away,
and left him lonelier than before. Even disdain had something of human
companionship in it.

And now, hunger's pangs having been fairly well appeased by the remnant
of the sponge loaf, Paul had time to surrender himself to the thought
of impending starvation. He convinced himself that a boy could die of
starvation in two days. Morrow at noontide would see him stark and cold.
He grew newly holy at this reflection, and forgave everybody afresh with
flattering tears. It became a sort of essential that he should leave a
memorial on the wall of the cell in which he was about to perish, and
so he got out the broken knife from under the mattress, and carved a big
cross in the papered plaster of the wall. It was less artistic in its
outline than he could have hoped; but its symbolism, at least, was
clear, and he wept and exulted as he worked at it.

The heavy day went by and the heavy night, and he began to be really
hollow, and to believe with less than his original sense of comfort
that his end was near. With the morning came his father with yesterday's
question. Paul broke into wild tears and protests. He wasn't, wasn't,
wasn't guilty.

'Vary good. Yell just stay there.'

Dick, touched by the agony of despair with which Paul threw himself upon
the bed, advised surrender.

'What's a lickin'?' said Dick. 'Have it over.'

'Oh, Dick,' cried Paul, clipping at the air between them, 'plead for
me!'

'Not me,' said Dick, who was less literary than Paul, and misunderstood
the unfamiliar word--'bleed for yourself.'

And again the heavy day went on, and Paul wept and wept alone. But it
happened that this was scouring day; and a sort of wooden fender which
fenced in the foot of the eight-day clock bei