Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/128

116 orders that had not been punctually fulfilled, etc.—But when we met again at luncheon, I thought he had rather a beaten-out look, a look of extreme weariness. I ascribed it to the amount of conventional thought and worry that he had gone through of late, and perhaps a little to the unusual excitement of last night.

The next day was quite ordinary and uneventful. And so the day after. Everything was done now. We were to start early in the morning from Charing Cross. Consequently, that night we went to bed earlier than usual at about half-past nine.

I, out in the hall, lit my candle first: said good-night to him in the library: and was almost up to the top of the first staircase, where our ways separated, when I heard him call out. I stopped and listened.

He called again;

'Boy!'

I answered:

'Yes?'

'Good-night!'

'Good-night.'

'No: wait. I will be up in a moment to shake hands with you. The night before the campaign opens, eh?' He came out: lit his candle (I watched him over the bannisters. I see him now): and came up slowly. I stepped back, and stood waiting for him in the dark entrance of the passage.

Then we shook hands, but he did not let mine go after he had pressed it. I turned my eyes from his face generally to his eyes, and looked into them, puckering up my mouth a little to one side.

He smiled: smiled a second time, and let fall my hand.—He meant something by that smile, and I understood something, but I did not, and do not, quite know what.

Mine was a dreamless sleep that night.

Sitting opposite him in the railway-carriage some five minutes before we were to start, he caught me glancing at him in a peculiar way.

'I can tell you what you are thinking of,' he said, bending towards me and putting his hand on my knee, 'you are half-puzzled, half amused at my "delusion."