Presently one of them stopped feeding,
began to sniff the air, and then looking round, espied the child,
and began slowly to approach him. The child had no terror of the
great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him, when the great
beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with one bound,
striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him with his
pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and faintness,
became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to drag
himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly
saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his
hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to
him, and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him
again and again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he
left him, the child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and
pain, crept back home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who
wept over him; and the child found that his guardian came to visit
him, as kind and gentle as ever. And at last one day when he sate
beside the child, holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling
him an old tale to comfort him, the child summoned up courage to
ask him a question about the garden and the wood; but at the first
word his guardian dropped his hand, and left him without a word.
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