years he was destined to struggle with Walter's facts before they would assume their right proportion. His lack of animal exuberance made it necessary for him to acquire an extensive new acreage of observation before the magnitude of the trees of knowledge could be dwarfed to normal. Walter was interested in facts per se—the more deeply dyed the better. Paul, even at the age of eleven, was interested in facts per the light they shed on the abiding rules of the universe. Night after night, his mind fevered with distorted images, he cursed his chum for having suggested them. For, more than any facts in his life, they seemed to fill the world with discord. Nothing had ever flatted as this discovery flatted. At first he refused to believe but there was no evading Walter's steady accumulation of proofs.
The matter was placed beyond dispute by Mark Laval. "Why, didn't you know?" the French boy commented, when Paul dared broach the subject. To Mark it was a truth as familiar as any other. His indifference had the effect of a cooling stream. If Mark, with his riotous imagination, could be so casual about the overwhelming phenomena of creation, there was surely some hope of a balance for Paul.
More jealously than ever, he guarded the margin of reserve in his companionship with Walter. For there were still dark wells in his chum's mind into which he steadfastly declined to look. He had learned new ways of keeping Walter in place. One of them was to cultivate Mark Laval. This was fair retaliation for Walter's association with John Ashmill, since Paul had agreed to drop his feud with the bully. Nothing humiliated Walter so promptly as a resort on Paul's part to French, which Mark spoke with a strong habitant twang. Walter understood not a word of what he enviously described as a "dirty lingo" and was brought to book by his sense of impotence, whereupon Paul's conscience troubled him at
