General Favart lived in the other house through the door in the wall. He came to visit us rarely. He leant more heavily on his cane, and his cloak seemed to have become blacker, his hair whiter, and his scar more prominent. He could scarcely speak a word of English, so I never knew what he thought. But it seemed to me he was sorrowing. One day we children were told that he was dead; after that the door between the two gardens was taken down and the hole in the wall bricked up. BOOK II--THE PULLING DOWN OF THE WALLS _And man returned to the ground out of which he was taken, and his wife bare children and he builded walls. But thou shalt think an evil thought and say, “I will go up to the land of unwalled villages._” CHAPTER I--THE RED HOUSE Dante, it’s time you went to school.” For the past three years, since he had married the Snow Lady, my father had given me lessons in his study for the last hour of every morning before lunch. It had been the Snow Lady’s idea; she said I was growing up a perfect ignoramus. My father tilted up his spectacles to his forehead, and gazed across the table at me thoughtfully. “Yes,” he repeated, “I’ll be sorry to lose you, my boy; but it’s time you went to school.” He was to lose me; then I was to go away! My heart sank, and leapt, and sank again with a dreadful joy of expectation. In my childish way I had always been impatient of the present--a Columbus ceaselessly watching for the first trace of seaweed broken loose from the shores of the unknown. Change, which at mid-life we so bitterly resent, was at that time life’s great allurement. The school selected was one of the smaller public-schools, lying fifteen miles distant from Stoke Newington. It was called the Red House and stood on Eden Hill. It was situated in lovely country, so my father said, and had for its head-master a man with whom he was slightly acquainted, whose name was the Reverend Robert Sneard. For the next few weeks I was a semi-hero. Ruthita regarded me with the kind of pitying awe that a bullock inspires in children, when they meet it being driven lowing along a road to be slaughtered. Everyone became busy over preparations for my departure--even the Snow Lady, who seldom worked. I was allowed to sit up quite late, watching her pretty fingers flashing the needle in and out the flannel that grew into shirts for me to wear. Ruthita would snuggle up beside me, her long black curls tickling my cheek. There were lengthy silences. Then Ruthita would look up at her mother and say, “Mumsie, I don’t know whatever we shall do without him.” And sometimes, when she said it, the Snow Lady would laugh in her Frenchy way and answer, “Why, Ruthita, what’s one little boy? He’s so tiny; he won’t leave much empty space.” But once, it was the night before I left, she choked in the middle of her laughing and took us both into her arms, telling us that she loved us equally. “I can’t think what I’ll do without my little lover,” she said.