I had been doubtful at first between the respective advantages of a whipping and the writing out of these pages of history; but I decided at last on history because he was backward in this particular subject, and also because the sitting still for hours would be the greater punishment to him. "You know, Roland, this would not have happened if I had been at home," I said to him. "Why did it happen because I was out?" "They aggravate me," he said simply. I knew how it had been. Old Nurse, devoted though she was, was of no use whatever for a child with a temperament, and had not perceived the psychic moment when it was necessary to send him out of the nursery. I should have felt it in my blood if I had been there, and the whole ugly affair would not have happened. "You see the justness of your punishment, don't you, Roland?" "You're always just, Big Yeogh Wough. I've never known you unjust yet." So he had set himself to his pages of history, all through the long and lovely summer day. He said once, later on, that I had never broken a promise to him, either. I had always been careful never to make one which I was not humanly sure of being able to keep. For promises broken to children are greater crimes than many that are punished at the Old Bailey. So we had not been sure in any case about leaving Little Yeogh Wough at home; and when he pleaded to go with us on board the Peninsular and Oriental liner that was to take us and certain others on her maiden trip in the Baltic, we gave way far more easily than he might have expected. "Would you have been very miserable if we had said No to you, Roland?" I asked him. "No. I should have been sorry, but I should have remembered that text that you're always saying." "Text?" I lifted my eyes in surprise. "Yes. You know, that one: 'Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.'" "That's not a text. It ought to be, but it isn't. But it's a very good motto to steer through life by. The thing to do is always to expect nothing, but to try for everything." And so it came about that on a certain Friday morning in August the brave little feet of the boy of my heart walked for the first time on the deck of a big ship.