On a wild stormy evening he found himself in the nursery.

A week remained now--to-day fortnight he would be in another world, an alarming, fierce, tremendous world.

He looked at the rocking-horse with its absurd tail and the patch on its back, that had been worn away by its faithful riders, and suddenly he was crying.

This was a thing that he never did, that he had strenuously, persistently refrained from doing all these weeks, but now, in the strangest way, it was the conviction that the world into which he was going wouldn't care in the least for the doll's-house, and would mock brutally, derisively at the rocking-horse, that defeated him.

It was even the knowledge that, in a very short time, he himself would be mocking.
He sat down on the floor and cried.