Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/291

Rh through the opening and pushed his way on through the tangle of dry shrubbery. He heard the inhospitable scream of the peacock as he crossed the parched lawn, and the bawling of a neglected calf in one of the outbuildings beyond the grim-fronted manor-house. He stared up at that house as he entered the lengthening shadow from its dormer-windowed hip roof, and as he did so he was tempted to laugh down what seemed little more than half-hysteric fears huddling about his heart. It was sheer paganism, he tried to tell himself, this foolish fretting of his own soul with the thought that exceptional happiness such as his promised to be stood in some way involved with exceptional penalties. He even stopped and looked up at the house again, deciphering something reassuring in its unaltered and unaltering face. Then, of a sudden, his heart seemed to stop beating. For drifting out of its open attic window he saw a thinly-coiling column of smoke.

He stood, for a ponderable space of time, frowning vacuously up at it. Then,