."

"Indeed! What about your brother--a shepherd if ever there was? Look how
he bores you! Don't be so sentimental."

"But--oh, you mean--"

"Your brother Stephen."

He glanced at her nervously. He had never known her so queer before.
Perhaps it was some literary allusion that he had not caught; but her
face did not at that moment suggest literature. In the differential
tones that one uses to an old and infirm person he said "Stephen Wonham
isn't my brother, Aunt Emily."

"My dear, you're that precise. One can't say 'half-brother' every time."

They approached the central tree.

"How you do puzzle me," he said, dropping her arm and beginning to
laugh. "How could I have a half-brother?"

She made no answer.

Then a horror leapt straight at him, and he beat it back and said,
"I will not be frightened." The tree in the centre revolved, the tree
disappeared, and he saw a room--the room where his father had lived in
town. "Gently," he told himself, "gently." Still laughing, he said, "I,
with a brother-younger it's not possible." The horror leapt again, and
he exclaimed, "It's a foul lie!"

"My dear, my dear!"

"It's a foul lie! He wasn't--I won't stand--"

"My dear, before you say several noble things, remember that it's worse
for him than for you--worse for your brother, for your half-brother, for
your younger brother."

But he heard her no longer. He was gazing at the past, which he had
praised so recently, which gaped ever wider, like an unhallowed grave.
Turn where he would, it encircled him. It took visible form: it was this
double entrenchment of the Rings. His mouth went cold, and he knew that
he was going to faint among the dead. He started running, missed the
exit, stumbled on the inner barrier, fell into darkness--

"Get his head down," said a voice. "Get the blood back into him.
That's all he wants. Leave him to me. Elliot!"--the blood was
returning--"Elliot, wake up!"

He woke up. The earth he had dreaded lay close to his eyes, and seemed
beautiful. He saw the structure of the clods. A tiny beetle swung on
the grass blade. On his own neck a human hand pressed, guiding the blood
back to his brain.

There broke from him a cry, not of horror but of acceptance. For one
short moment he understood. "Stephen--" he began, and then he heard his
own name called: "Rickie! Rickie!" Agnes hurried from her post on the
margin, and, as if understanding also, caught him to her breast.

Stephen offered to he