What if it should break him, what if it meant he could never lift his voice again? Yet his voice though silent, his voice though a frail boy's, should be voluminous on the winds of the world, and if his body were cast aside, his heart's blood would be red energy in the hearts of the cohorts of Joy. His figure suddenly, with the automatic gesture of the marionette, straightened itself. With something of defiance he flung his chest forward and clenched both his fists. A wave of swift colour flushed into his cheeks and as swiftly withdrew. He was speaking once more. The passion that moved the lad now was too swift merely for swift diction. He spoke evenly, his voice was almost a whisper. The black-bearded man who had stood for some moments on the edge of the crowd, disappeared. No one noticed him. At last Philip dropped loosely into the chair behind him on the cart. For an hour or two that evening hardly a man moved from the gathering in front of the railings of the Longton Park. "Come to our house and have some grub!" said Harry apprehensively to Philip, who leaned against the railings, ashen-pale. Philip turned away wearily. "Go away, Harry, I'm done!" He walked home very slowly, carefully avoiding the lines between the pavement slabs. He trod on the foot of a dignitary from the _Polisher Shool_, who swore at him and spat into the street. CHAPTER VII When the storm had subsided, Philip felt like a sea-battered hulk, shorn of spars, incompetent to face wind and tide. The muscle of his left arm suffered peculiarly. Really, the way it had been wrenched and bruised was almost comical. As if his arm had espoused Blatchford and orated on the waste croft which his father had so persistently misnamed the "Public ways and the market-places." Poor old muscle! He dropped his forearm tenderly to see if the movement did not circle the upper arm with bracelets of fire. He took his shirt off and licked the coloured wound with his tongue, like an animal released from a trap. He stared into a jagged fragment of mirror, and seeing his face so grey and drawn burst unaccountably into a roar of laughter. He drowned the noise at once by biting his lip fiercely. "The Romance of a Brachial Muscle!" What a fine subject for a long narrative poem in countless cantos! Oh, by God, he was miserable! What was wrong with Life? Why were Life and he always at daggers drawn? He recapitulated the sum of his conscious crimes. He had once stolen carrots from the cellar, it was true! But equipoise had been asserted: he had been rewarded by an ample stomach-ache. And finally, when physical calm had been established, to round off his state with spiritual calm, he had bought two penn'orth of carrots and replaced them in the cellar. Also, he was bound to confess, he invariably kept his book open in school during the reciting of prepared passages. But then the boy behind him used his own collar as he himself used the collar of the boy in front. It