Fortitude

ty minutes would perhaps cover it, but, most of the time, the road went up hill and that made running difficult; he had certainly no intention of running to-night, there were too m

cause on Christmas Eve there would be parties and merrymakings. Peter looked a tiny and rather desolate figure against the snow as he climbed the hill. There was a long way to go. There would be Green Street at the top, past the post office, then down again into the Square where the Tower was, then through

icky, and even men like Stephen, had seen ghosts so often, and Peter himself could tell odd stories about the Grey Hill-no, ghosts held no terror. But, very slowly, the shadow of all that he must very soon go through was creeping about him. When he first came out of The Bending Mule he stil

limbed the hill the reaction from the excitement of his late adventure suddenly made him very miserable indeed, so that he had an immediate impulse to cry, but he stood still in the middle of the street and made fists with his ha

d departed were it not that they were all afraid to face him. Peter knew that that was true, because Mrs. Trussit had told him so. It was this hopeless feeling of indiscriminate punishment that made everything so bad. Until he was eight years old Peter had not been beaten at all, but when he was very young indeed he had learnt to crawl away when he heard his father's step, and he had never cried as a baby because his nurse's white scared face had frightened him so. And then, of course, there was his mother, his poor mother-that was another reason for silence. He never saw his mother for more than a minute at a time because she was ill, had

wed to ramble about by himself, so that it was only at mealtimes and during the

o black and uncomfortable with its hard wooden back, the big dining-room table with its green cloth (faded a little in the middle where a pot with a fern in it always stood) and his aunt with her frizzy yellow hair, her black mittens and her long bony fingers playing her interminable Patience, and then two arm-chairs by the fire, in one of them old grandfather Westcott, almost invisible beneath a load of rugs and cushions and only the white hairs on the top of his head sticking out like some strange plant, and in the other chair his father, motionless, reading th

t it was not the beating itself that frightened him most, but rather all the circumstances that attended it-it was even the dark house, the band of trees about it, that first dreadful moment when he would hear his knock echo through the passages, and then the patter of Mrs. Trussit's slippers as she came to open the door for him-then Mrs. Trussit's fat arm and the candle raised above her head, and "Oh, it's you, Mr. Peter," and then the opening of the dining-room door and "It's Master Peter, si

Peregrine Pickle and David Copperfield, he would run into the world and seek his fortune, and then, afterwards, he would write his book of adventures as they had done. His heart beat at the thought, and he passed the high gates and dark trees of The Man at Arms with quick step and h

Cow, a little inn amongst the gorse, ten miles away, or looking for the lost church among the sand-dunes at Porthperran. All these things had nothing whatever to do with his father and old Parlow and his lessons-and it was undoubtedly this other sort of life that he would lead, with th

white dim world. Turning a corner the road lay straight before him and to the right along the common was the black clump of trees that hid his home. He

; he would be very tired and would rather be alone; and then there would be the morning, when it would be every bit as bad, and perhaps worse. But if he ran away altogether? ... He stopped in the middle of the road and thought about it-the noise of the sea came up to him like the march of men and with it the sick melancholy moan of the Bell Rock, but the rest of the world was holding its breath, so still it seemed. But whither should he run? He could not run so far away that his father could not find him-his father's arm s

ere lights behind the dining-room windows-it

uilding, and then there was a silence that was even more terrible. He could fancy how his aunt would start and put down her Patience cards for a moment and look, in her scared way, at the window-he knew that his father would not move from behind his paper, and that there

into the hall and, after a second's pause, she followed him in, banging the hall door behind her. Then she opened the d

g his cloth cap round and round in his hands. He couldn't see anything at first

me back,

d Peter could see the round bald patch on the top of his head. Aunt Jessie was talking to herself about her cards in a very agitated whisper-"No

ng voice came from out of the rugs. "Oh! dear, what a doze I've had! It must be eight o'clock! Wha

n a voice that seemed to co

I've com

e conscious of him for the first time. When he spoke it was as though his voice

have yo

town,

e he

ther and grandfather. He was tremendously conscious of the grim a

u been doing

n The Bending

u not come

was no

t you ought t

hat I was to tell you that I have done my sums very badly this w

any excuse for

fat

up to your room. I will

, fa

d the door softly behind him, and then