“Tears are a strong magic,” Mr. Noah had said. And at the thought the tears stopped. Still there was a tear, the one on his hand. He rubbed it on the pillar of the porch.
And instantly a queer tight thin feeling swept through him. He felt giddy and shut his eyes. His boots, ever sympathetic, shuffled on the carpet. Or was it the carpet? It was very thick and—He opened his eyes. His feet were once more on the long grass of the illimitable prairie. And in front of him towered the gigantic porch of a vast building and a domino path leading up to it.
“Oh, I am so glad,” cried Philip among the grass. “I couldn’t have borne it if she’d been lost forever, and all my fault.”
The gigantic porch lowered frowningly above him. What would he find on the other side of it?
“I don’t care. I’ve simply got to go,” he said, and stepped out bravely. “If I can’t be a hero I’ll try to behave like one.”
And with that he stepped out, stumbling a little in the thick grass, and the dark shadow of the porch received him.
“Bother the child,” said the nurse, coming into the drawing-room a little later; “if he hasn’t been at his precious building game again! I shall have to give him a lesson over this—I can see that. And I will too—a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.”
She went through the house, looking for the too bold builder that she might give him that lesson. Then she went through the garden, still on the same errand.
Half an hour later she burst into the servants’ hall and threw herself into a chair.
“I don’t care what happens now,” she said. “The house is bewitched, I think. I shall go the very minute I’ve had my dinner.”
“What’s up now?” the cook came to the door to say.
“Up?” said the nurse. “Oh, nothing’s up. What should there be? Everything’s all right and beautiful, and just as it should be, of course.”
“Miss Lucy’s not found yet, of course, but that’s all, isn’t it?”
“All? And enough too, I should have thought,” said the nurse. “But as it happens it’s not all. The boy’s lost now. Oh, I’m not joking. He’s lost I tell you, the same as the other one—and I’m off out of this by the two thirty-seven train, and I don’t care who knows it.”
“Lor!” said the cook.
Before starting for the two thirty-seven train the nurse went back to the drawing-room to destroy Philip’s new building, to restore to their proper places its books, candlesticks, vases, and chessmen.
There we will leave her.
IV
The Dragon-Slayer
When Philip walked up the domino path and under the vast arch into the darkness beyond, his heart felt strong with high resolve. His legs, however, felt weak; strangely weak, especially about the knees. The doorway was so enormous, that which lay beyond was so dark, and he himself so very very small. As he passed under the little gateway which he had built of three dominoes with the little silver knight in armour on the top, he noticed that he was only as high as a domino, and you know how very little that is.
Philip went along the domino path. He had to walk carefully, for to him the spots on the dominoes were quite deep hollows. But as they were black they were easy to see. He had made three arches, one beyond another, of two pairs of silver candlesticks with silver inkstands on the top of them. The third pair of silver candlesticks had a book on the top of them because there were no more inkstands. And when he had passed through the three silver arches, he stopped.
Beyond lay a sort of velvety darkness with white gleams in it. And as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a great hall of silver pillars, gigantic silver candlesticks they seemed to be, and they went in long vistas this way and that way and every way, like the hop-poles in a hop-field, so that whichever way you turned, a long pillared corridor lay in front of you.
Philip had no idea which way he ought to go. It seemed most unlikely that he would find Lucy in a dark hall with silver pillars.
“All the same,” he said, “it’s not so dark as it was, by long chalks.”
It was not. The silver pillars had begun to give out a faint soft glow like the silver phosphorescence that lies in sea pools in summer time.
“It’s lucky too,” he said, “because of the holes in the floor.”
The holes were the spots on the dominoes with which the pillared hall was paved.
“I wonder what part of the city where Lucy is I shall come out at?” Philip asked himself. But he need not have troubled. He did not come out at all. He walked on and on and on and on and on. He thought he was walking straight, but really he was turning first this way and then that, and then the other way among the avenues of silver pillars which all looked just alike.
He was getting very tired, and he had been walking a long time, before he came to anything that was not silver pillars and velvet black under invisible roofs, and floor paved with dominoes laid very close together.
“Oh, I am glad!” he said at last, when he saw the pavement narrow to a single line of dominoes just like the
