Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/230

 “Our Jack’s not come home yet.” he said at last.

Lois stirred faintly. “Hasn’t he?” she said.

“No.” There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.

“Selby’s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it——”

“You have no loss, dadda?”

“Nothing to mention.” After another silence, her father said:

“I’d rather be myself than William Selby, Of course it may merely be bad luck—you don’t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn’t like to add one to the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ‘George’ when it broke out—I don’t know where the lad was——!”

“Father,” broke in Lois, “why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as if Will had done it?” She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her pale, mute face.

“I don’t talk as if Will had done it,” he said. “I don’t even think it.”

Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left the room. Her father sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees whistled faintly into the fire. He was not thinking about her.

Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlour-maid, to go out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.