The accuracy of his touch almost startled him, and his colour deepened as the boy’s beauty flowed in upon him, filling him with a curious pleasure. He laughed aloud. ‘You are just like one of the young gods,’ he cried. ‘I wonder if you really are one. Perhaps if we stay much longer we shall draw the others down from heaven.’ ‘Isn’t that what you would like? I expect you still, deep down, have a kind of faith in them.’ ‘Ah, how can I help having faith when one stands living before my eyes? All hail, dear Dionysus! child of fire and dew, and the creeping, delicate vine!... Should we not offer up a sacrifice, Harold? I have nothing here but these dry sea-flowers which I gathered from the rock, but it is into the heart of the giver, and not at the gift, that the gods look.... Let us offer our slender garland to the presiding deity of the place.’ He knelt down, and laid the few sea-pinks, and the seaweed with which he had adorned his friend, on a little shelf of rock. ‘That is the altar,’ he said smiling, but more than half serious. Then he took Brocklehurst’s hand and pulled him down to kneel beside him while he prayed. ‘What god shall I give them to?’ he whispered. ‘You see they have so few worshippers left that they may be a little jealous of one another. We do not want the waves to rise up against us as they rose against Hippolytus.’ ‘Give them to the unknown God.’ ‘Hush!――they will hear you: they must be drawing very near.――O gods of Hellas! If anything in our lives have found favour in your sight, accept this, our gift, which, though it be poor, is given with our love; and we beg that you will grant to each of us that thing which may be best for him.... Harold, “need we anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.”’ IX He could not quite say how it had happened. It had come so suddenly, so suddenly. And now, a few steps behind the others, he was walking toward the house. He had a feeling of sickness, of horror: a helpless misery, the meaning of which he shrank from realising, darkened his mind. Only he remembered――he could not help remembering: it was there before him with a curious vividness――the light of the afternoon sun on the long white road; the glare, the heat, something dark and motionless stretched in the dust――still, very still.... Brocklehurst had been walking a few paces behind him, and close to the hedge. He had been pulling some wildflowers――a few had been scattered about him as he lay there on the road, so strangely quiet and white, a thin stream of red blood creeping through his hair and widening out, forming a little patch of mud.... And when he had lifted him, the curious whiteness of his face! Yet in a way he had escaped wonderfully. None of the wheels had touched him: just that single kick a little above his left ear....