He had no tenor of disgrace; his father was his only court of appeal, and that old rocky sinner, sitting alone with his proud spirit and his grey hairs, in his northern fastness, hating and despising the world, would himself slay, had he the opportunity, as many men of the Carfax kind as he could find.
He had no terror of pain--he did not know what that kind of fear was.
The Dunes had always faced Death.
But he began, dimly, now to perceive that there were larger, crueller issues before him than these material punishments.

He had known since he was a tiny child a picture by some Spanish painter, whose name he had forgotten, that had always hung on the wall of the passage opposite his bedroom.

It was a large engraving in sharply contrasted black and white, of a knight who rode through mists along a climbing road up into the heart of towering hills.

The mountains bad an active life in the picture; they seemed to crowd forward eager to swallow him.

Beside the spectre horse that he rode there was no other life.