Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/103

 and that's why I'm here. Mind you, boy,” and the old man's fingers clutched him very tightly—“If you don't get the better of the Devil you'll be just like me one of these days. So'll he be, my son, one day. Just like me—and then it'll be your turn, my boy. Oh, they Westcotts! Oh! my pains! Oh! my pains! Oh! I'm a poor old man!—poor old man!”

His head sunk beneath the cushions again and his muttering died away like a kettle when the lid has been put on to it.

Peter had been kneeling so as to catch his grandfather's words. Now he drew himself up and with frowning brows faced the room. Had he but known it he was at that moment, exactly like his father.

He went slowly up to his attic.

His little book-case had gained in the last two years—there were now three of Henry Galleon's novels there. Bobby had given him one, “Henry Lessingham,” shining bravely in its red and gold; he had bought another, “The Downs,” second hand, and it was rather tattered and well thumbed. Another, “The Roads,” was a shilling paper copy. He had read these three again and again until he knew them by heart, almost word by word. He took down “Henry Lessingham” now and opened it at a page that was turned down. It is Book III, chapter VI, and there is this passage:

But, concerning the Traveller who would enter the House of Courage there are many lands that must he passed on the road before he rest there. There is, first, the Land of Lacking All Things—that is hard to cross. There is, Secondly, the Land of Having All Things. There is the Traveller's Fortitude most hardly tested. There is, Thirdly, The Land of Losing All Those Things that One Hath Possessed. That is a hard country indeed for the memory of the pleasantness of those earlier joys redoubleth the agony of lacking them. But at the end there is a Land of ice and snow that few travellers have compassed, and that is the Land of Knowing What One Hath Missed The Bird was in the hand and one let it go that is the hardest agony of all the journey  but if these lands be