“I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.”
“Suddenly his mother let out a great shuddering sob. ‘O my God. O my God.’ She said it over and over, her head down on her arms. His father moved to put his arm around her awkwardly, but he didn’t take his eyes off Jess.”
“She was scraping at the mud on her bare legs. ‘I just wanted to find you, so you wouldn’t be so lonesome.’ She hung her head. ‘But I got too scared.‘”
“And for three months… for three months I tried to convince myself that you were better off without me. I tried to convince myself that everything I’d done had made you hate me.”
“You weren’t selfish. You need to be among your own kind. Quite understandable. It’s just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe,” said Silas. “But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.”
“Death—and a violent death—for these poor unfortunates! The thought wrung Tom’s heart-strings. The spirit of compassion took control of him, to the exclusion of all other considerations; he never thought of the offended laws, or of the grief or loss which these three criminals had inflicted upon their victims, he could think of nothing but the scaffold and the grisly fate hanging over the heads of the condemned. His concern made him even forget, for the moment, that he was but the false shadow of a king, not the substance.”
“I stared hard into the faces of grownups, searching for a look of pity, of concern, wishing just one person would ask me: ‘What happened little girl?’ Then I could explain to somebody, and they might tell me what I was doing wrong. Why nobody liked me.”
“I said nothing, nor so much as lifted my face. I had seen murder done, and a great, ruddy, jovial gentleman struck out of life in a moment; the pity of that sight was still sore within me, and yet that was but a part of my concern. Here was murder done upon the man Alan hated; here was Alan skulking in the trees and running from the troops; and whether his was the hand that fired or only the head that ordered, signified but little. By my way of it, my only friend in that wild country was blood-guilty in the first degree; I held him in horror; I could not look upon his face; I would have rather lain alone in the rain on my cold isle, than in that warm wood beside a murderer.”
“I expect he’s just gone home,” said Christopher Robin to Rabbit.
“Did he say Good-bye-and-thank-you-for-a-nice-time?” said Rabbit.
“He’d only just said how-do-you-do,” said Christopher Robin.
“Ha!” said Rabbit. After thinking a little, he went on: “Has he written a letter saying how much he enjoyed himself, and how sorry he was he had to go so suddenly?”
Christopher Robin didn’t think he had.
“Ha!” said Rabbit again, and looked very important. “This is Serious. He is Lost. We must begin the Search at once.”
“Are you sure she is safe?” whispered Jo, looking remorsefully at the golden head, which might have been swept away from her sight forever under the treacherous ice.
“Before it strikes quarter past seven I’ll definitely have to have got properly out of bed. And by then somebody will have come round from work to ask what’s happened to me as well, as they open up at work before seven o’clock.” And so he set himself to the task of swinging the entire length of his body out of the bed all at the same time. If he succeeded in falling out of bed in this way and kept his head raised as he did so he could probably avoid injuring it. His back seemed to be quite hard, and probably nothing would happen to it falling onto the carpet. His main concern was for the loud noise he was bound to make, and which even through all the doors would probably raise concern if not alarm. But it was something that had to be risked.