“Almost. It kind of hurts. But it's the right kind of hurting. It makes me want to be good. Never thought I'd want to be that.” “What did you think?” For a moment a fierce look came into his eyes. “What does an animal think of when it's trapped? It thinks of all the ways in which it can get back at the people who put it there. But now----.” He picked up the wall-flowers and smelt them. “She brought them this morning--the littlest one, with the gray hair and tiny hands. They were all wet with dew when she brought them. You need to go to prison, Peter, to know what flowers can mean to a chap.” There was a tap at the door. Miss Madge entered, bringing some beef-tea. When she had gone Ocky said, “They take it in turns.” Peter remembered how, going always into separate rooms with them, they'd taken turns in owning himself and Kay when they were children. How rarely life had allowed them to love anything! Uncle Waffles' thoughts seemed to have been following the same track. He paused, with the cup half-way to his mouth. “Those women ought to have married.--Been in prison most of their lives, you said? But I don't know; marriage can be a worse hell.” He turned to Peter. “D'you remember at Sandport how she'd never let me kiss her? It was like that from the first. She kept me hungry. I stole to make her love me. She was always talking about her first husband and making me jealous. And yet----.” He stopped and gazed vacantly across the room to where sparrows fluttered on the sill and sunlight fell. Peter supposed that he had forgotten what he was going to have said. Suddenly his face became all purpose and pleading. He flung back the bedclothes and leant out, gripping Peter's shoulders till they hurt. “I'd steal again to-morrow to get one day of her bought affection. My God, how I've longed for her! Make her come to me. You must, Peter. You shall. Don't tell her who I am. Oh, don't refuse me.” The sharp agony and desperate determination of a man so drifting and careless took Peter aback. He recalled those days when he had hidden him in the stable--it had been the same then. He had always been urging that Je-hane should be persuaded to walk in the garden that he might catch a glimpse of her. The one strong loyalty of his weak existence had been the love of this woman. “Get her to come to you!” Peter said. “But how? She wouldn't. She----” Ocky burried his face in the pillow. How thin he was and listless! How spent! How----. What was the word? How smashed! It was as though in the human quarry some chance stone of calamity had fallen on him, making him a moral cripple. He was what he was through the sort of accident that might happen to any man--to the Faun Man, if Eve refused to love him; even to Peter himself. The boy pulled the clothes back over the man. “Somehow--I don't know how--somehow I'll do it. I promise.” After that, whenever Peter entered the white room, he saw how his uncle watched for someone to follow.